Known Space in Standard Candles' far future is defined by struggle, both between modes of production (roughly, "economic systems") and the ceaseless struggle for the liberation of all beings, in the context of a world of magic and paranormal mystery where transhuman technologies enable people to share memories, thoughts, and mental firmware over the internet, while advanced nano-manufacturing processes make wonders possible, as well as making space travel reachable for the relatively common person.
Beware! There are lots and lots of words here. This is the "lore manual". You are welcome to skip around to what you want to read; this isn't meant to be processed in any particular order. Sooner or later I will have a table of contents here.
THE MULTIVERSE
Standard Candles takes place in the pancosmos, the in-setting jargon for "multiverse". (I just think it rolls off the tongue better.) Starships equipped with a warp drive are capable of peeling away from one cosmos (universe) and traveling some distance through higher-dimensional space, called hyperspace or "the Bulk", to another universe where they perform a "brane injection" and attach their warp bubble to the new universe. This causes an initial shock as the vacuum inside the bubble is overtaken by the vacuum outside, exposing the ship inside to the alternate physical laws of the new brane. There are actually multiple types of multiverse, but for the most part, transhumans are limited to one kind called the brane pancosmos, where travel between cosmoi works as described above.
However, it's common for people from all sorts of worlds - aliens, fantasy realms, alternate Earths, alternate timelines of other kinds of world, and so on - to find their way into the Known Pancosmos by various strange, often paranormal means: wandering into the wrong cave or abandoned building that turns out to be a portal to parts unknown, being abducted by inscrutable entities... Known Space seems to rack up accidental multiverse explorers frequently, to the point that the Wanderers' Society has cropped up, a type of organization providing assistance to those who find their way in. Multiversal travelers do not always want to make their presence known to the authorities, as the unique abilities and other characteristics they bring may attract the interest (or ire) of the military, police, businesses, underground kidnappers, and so forth - so such organizations are also sometimes semi-clandestine.
WANDERERS' SOCIETIES & THE MUNDANE REALITY OF MULTIVERSAL CASTAWAYS
Wanderers' Societies are not a monolith, just a common name for a diverse group of organizations formed by even more diverse groups of people. Many are out in the open, even explicitly supported or run by the state or some other large public-facing entity. These more open Societies attract most of the more mundane wanderers, as well as accidental time travelers and visitors from alternate histories who are of great interest to historians and sociologists - curiously, no visitors from the future have been conclusively identified, though there have been a few claimants, mostly disproven.
There are drifter groups on social media that help people find other lost souls from their homeworlds. Societies often provide rescue and care for people suffering physical trauma from an unfamiliar atmospheric mixture, temperature environment or set of physical laws; they may offer benefits and financial aid, language classes and "rehabilitation" for the citizenship and/or workforce of the far future, cyberware, housing help, legal representation and other services - though the quality and provision varies from place to place, as different countries and political factions have different priorities about the well-being of multiversal travelers, particularly those that cannot be immediately put to use. Mundane travelers are often faced with great difficulty by ambivalent or actively xenophobic factions, and a hostile labor market in the capitalist countries.
The situation of Wanderers harboring fantastical powers and items of value is even more textured. (And the coordinates of "mundane" and "fantastical" in a world where low-level magic is more or less ubiquitous across the Known Pancosmos may be a bit different from expected.) Those with innate powers are frequently offered significant benefits and monetary reward for study of their abilities and the nature thereof, in hopes of gaining new insight or even reverse-engineering the engineering or occult phenomena responsible. Wanderers who are otherwise mundane aside from their cargo, on the other hand, tend to be in a more precarious position since if their item(s) of power is taken, they have no special leverage to make demands. In both cases, even when significant reward is offered, there is plenty of room for exploitation.
Many empowered Wanderers, of course, also simply avoid helping a government or organization on principle and/or out of disgust. And there are competing parties vying for the time of Wanderers who might be able to aid their fight or secure their hold on power. Different star nations have feelers in one anothers' streets and countrysides, as do various factions and interest groups - temples, gangs, companies, clubs, cadres, rebels, revolutionaries. And governments try to prevent people with special powers from "defecting" to other countries.
NOTES FOR NEW ARRIVALS: SEA SICKNESS
In the vastness of the infinite multiverse, different universes typically obey different physical laws. Sometimes these laws are only slightly divergent or only diverge in ways that allow life to easily cross from one world to another. Most of the universes out there are not like this, but since the world is infinite, that doesn't leave any shortage of hospitable places... at least in principle. Getting from one 'verse to another friendly one is often a different story.
Transhuman civilization inhabits a fortunate multiversal hub of "cosmoi" (universes) in the "pancosmos" (multiverse) with a lot of relatively hospitable physics, but transhuman robotics are still built tough to handle changes in physical law compared to a "baseline" human body, especially when they have to travel frequently between highly divergent worlds. This doesn't have to be a factor in our roleplay - generally, most places you will go in the Known Space of Standard Candles are habitable to a present-day human - but it can factor in if you find it interesting. The effects can range from minor discomfort through various forms of sickness. A harsh enough divergence will simply kill people, but obviously that's not very interesting.
A second implication of divergences in physical law is the effect it can have on magical abilities. Although some occult powers can be invoked seemingly anywhere in the pancosmos, others are limited in some way, either by certain esoteric physics that allow the invocation not existing elsewhere, or the reach / influence of a patron entity.
STYLISTIC & AESTHETIC CONSIDERATIONS
Okanverse isn't meant to explicitly evoke or pastiche any particular worldbuilding tropes / "-punk" / etc. However, I do want to evoke certain stuff that I think is sorely neglected in science fiction / fantasy / etc. Space sci-fi, in particular, is too often wrapped up in orchestral and ambient / synthwave music to the exception of anything else, gunmetal grey corridors, white plastic architecture and furniture, and neon blue and orange spaceships with eye-searing camera bloom. I want vibrant colors and music - funk, hiphop, etc. Lively space stations teeming with people and greenery, ships painted with murals and colorful designs and not simply splattered with abstract grey greeble. Known Space is by no means a paradise (yet, at least)... but it is full of life, and beautiful for it.
Visually, I'm inspired by Homeworld, No Man's Sky, Splatoon, Jet Set Radio, among others, and I hope to bring more of that kind of vibrancy forth in the future. And when I get into composing music for games in the setting I'd love to set characters walking through city streets and gazing into aircraft-crowded skies to sounds like these.
PHYSICAL LAW, MANYFOLD MAGICS, UNSEEN POWERS, & THE PARANORMAL
MAGIC IS NOT A SYSTEM
In typical fantasy settings, magic often refers to a specific system of powers and processes - the flow of "mana" between "ley lines" from which spellcasters draw "energy" to produce a fireball, for example. But in the vastness of existence, the laws of physics vary wildly from world to world, and so do the various forms of "magic". Whereas in one world, magic may primarily mean spellcasters drawing on some strange essence-power inherent to different elements to work alchemical processes, in another universe where spellcasting powers are more "limited" (for example) it might refer only to a form of strange clairvoyance. In Okanverse, magic is simply a dump category for powerful and subtle phenomena we don't (yet) understand - the same as it is in real life.
(The word "magic", for its part, derives from an old Persian word for a kind of religious leader, and was borrowed by classical Hellenic society as a word for categorizing religious practices not welcomed in the same way as the state-sanctioned cults, a meaning that transmitted onward through the Christian ages. Those whose ritual practices and belief systems were categorized as "magic", much like the classical Mediterraneans and the Christians themselves, did not see their own beliefs as magic, as in some sense fundamentally at odds with their understanding of things - to them that was the mundane reality of how the world worked.)
Hidden sympathies and shadow worlds
Although "magic as a whole" cannot be characterized as a specific, self-coherent system, there are a few things that can be said about magic in general, and there are certain kinds of thing that tend to give rise to phenomena we (subjectively) call magic. As stated earlier, I think magic may best be defined as "powerful and/or subtle phenomena not yet understood". On one hand, this can involve physical laws yet to be understood; on another, it can involve the intervention of powerful and/or invisible entities, or (frequently) some mixture of both. In either case, magic entails the invocation of some kind of "hidden sympathy" - a connection between a thing, or an action or process carried out using that thing, and some non-obvious effect.
Frequently, this involves sympathies between phenomena in our world and phenomena in some realm hidden from our ordinary senses. We could imagine an ecology of beings that follow us around, acting quickly or being small or diffuse enough in the environment to literally hide themselves, while intervening in our activities. Alternatively, perhaps they live in another universe and mess with us through small wormholes. A more esoteric example is the concept of complex dark matter: while dark matter may interact weakly with our particles, so that it passes through entire planets and stars without incident, some hypotheses contend that dark matter could interact strongly with itself, allowing dark matter to coalesce into entire shadow planets and stars invisible and intangible to us.
In the vast multiverse, there is more than one kind of universe. Typically, when "the multiverse" is discussed in popular media, people tend to think of two things: A collection of universes floating around each other in higher dimensions (AKA the "brane cosmos" in physics parlance) which have no common history and are separated by some physical distance, or a collection of alternate timelines. In addition to these (although time travel is not available to transhumanity), Okanverse also features the permutation - roughly speaking, a kind of parallel universe made of seemingly meaningless noise in our world.
"Permutation" (the rearrangement of a set of objects) refers to the fact that these worlds are, in a sense, merely a "rearrangement" or reinterpretation of the world that we see - a transform in perspective, or in other words of one's relationship to the world - sort of like how a screen & keyboard serve to transform the way we relate to a computer from inert hunk of plastic to a certain kind of digital world-in-itself, with its own internal rules. You could say this about any kind of system, but the point is that patterns that we wouldn't otherwise notice (like the transmission of electrical potential through metal doped circuits, or even things that appear to us like random noise such as tv static or the Brownian motion of particles of air) can constitute the basis for the physics of another world that sees itself as self-coherent - and sees us as the insignificant noise: TV static or the errant winds in the air, fluctuations in the quantum foam, etc.
You can't "enter" these worlds in the conventional sense since they're not separated from us by distance, but by a "transform" of how you interact with the world. But you can interface with them, if you can find patterns of matter, motion, etc that manifest as coherent things both in our world and in theirs - and if you can use those to build a machine on the other side capable of housing your consciousness then you can transfer your mind over, too. This is the nature of many of Okanverse's spiritual, mystical realms: "transforms" or permutations of our world that exist alongside us in the form of invisible or non-obvious patterns in the things we can see, hiding under our noses. By sussing out these patterns that resonate with coherent patterns in the permutation-world, transhumans and other denizens of the visible realm can hook into processes on the other side capable of generating strange and powerful effects when they act on our world in return. Beings on the other side, of course, are capable of the same thing.
Currently, transhumanity's understanding of the permutation-metaverse is limited, and in many cases remains only a hypothetical explanation for occult phenomena. Insights are glimpsed in indirect and messy ways, the study of non-brane universes having somewhat in common with the great mass of educated guesswork modern scientists are making about the properties of exoplanets from the faintest details of light intensity and stellar parallax. Moreover, it is not uncommon for magical effects and hidden worlds to take place across some mixture of different kinds of universe. Further complicating the matter, permutations can even be "melded" with our world to varying degrees, such that a planet in one might also exist in another, as an extreme example. Stranger things still may yet be uncovered.
The magical is political, & vice-versa
Magic is obviously used for all kinds of personal and social benefit. But magic and the occult in Okanverse are also political - not just in the sense that people wield them for one end or other, but in that the "ecologies" of unseen realms are altered by the echoes of social practices in the "material" world, generating broad changes that could be likened (for instance) to climate change, or subtler effects such as the way factory farming breeds faster-spreading diseases due to short livestock lifecycles - but occult phenomena can even directly reflect social patterns back onto us. Beings in the unseen realms can be attracted by activity in ours, if it has a corresponding sympathy in their world. They may not even comprehend our existence - a social pattern like exchanging money might appear in the otherworld as a physical pattern like a swirl in water, which the locals may copy or otherwise interact with in various ways, causing strange consequences for us.
That is a very rough example, of course; the relationships between worlds are generally much subtler and stranger than that. And then sometimes certain kinds of social organizing and collective behavior can generate strange new beings and constructs altogether, like a tulpa but for an entire society. The past few centuries have seen an explosion of technologies enabling people to tap into this kind of thing - with applications like arranging relationships between people in certain ways to produce some magical effect or raise some specter or weird construct, but also, say, monitoring changes in the spirit realms to track what kind of behaviors people are engaging in (although the matter is much more complicated than just "looking at the spirit worlds allows you to definitively know what people are doing"), or even attempting to influence the social order through manipulations in the unseen realms.
Over time, watchdogs have also noticed a sharp uptick in the rate and density of outbreaks of paranormal cases, sightings and disasters across the centuries. Many speculate that the echoes of certain forms of politics and social order are producing these climate change-like magical follow-on effects that reflect back on our world, cause such mass hauntings and disappearances, attacks by sublime threats from beyond, or more generalized negative changes in the "environment". The threat of a global occult catastrophe is an apocalyptic possibility looming over the collective heads of transhumanity.
Symbolons, character masks, and geists: the ineffable and its ambassadors
Geist (GUY-sht) in Standard Candles roughly refers to the concept of a pattern of behaviors and/or ideas that controls people, rather than the other way around. More generally, the concept of geist can be extended to any kind of decision-making agent, such as animals, microbes, or sub-sentient AIs. Geists include a variety of strange entities - but also familiar human social structures such as capitalism, patriarchy, or religions. In a sense, geists are roughly comparable to "tulpas" or hive-minds, in that the thought patterns of an agent or the collective activity of a group of agents gives rise to a secondary entity that exerts control over its constituents, except that unlike in a traditional hivemind where multiple brains are linked together by some means into a greater processing structure, the brains of individual agents in a Geist need not share a single awareness, nor must individual sub-units even really be aware of what they are collectively doing at all. There are many distinctions between different sub-types of Geist, some of which can manifest their own "independent" and even human-like collective intelligence, such as the case of alien clades like the Angels.
Geists may also offer a potential explanation for at least some of the overtly strange logics governing various magical systems: for instance, the energies or processing capabilities that would be required to produce many forms of magic through ordinary means, such as teleportation or complex physical transformations, are vast - implying that whatever systems and/or entities are responsible for the magic may be endowed with incredible power and intelligence - yet the use of these powers seem often quite limited for magic to function the way it does, or limited in strange ways that would seem to go against the interests of such beings. Perhaps the entities are locked into some system(s) of incentives and disincentives which structures the use of their powers in such a way; that is, they are under the thrall of some kind of Geist whose modus operandi involves constraining the actions of otherwise powerful beings.
Character masks and symbolons are terms for the individual sub-agents and sub-forms of a Geist. When a person or general decisionmaking agent carries out the logic of a Geist, perpetuating the behaviors that constitute it, they serve as a "character mask" of that Geist, advancing its interests over their own interests. Symbolons are objects (or rather, the significance ascribed to objects by ideology or behavior) which are critical to the functioning of a Geist - money, for instance, is a symbolon of capitalism.
Some background: In broad strokes, the concept derives heavily from (this author's vague understanding of) the philosopher GWF Hegel's own Geists, as well as from Karl Marx's notion of "impersonal domination", which itself builds upon Hegel. Rather than being the product of human will, Hegel saw history and human behavior as a matter of humans acting out the ideology of their respective Volksgeists, the ideological "spirit of a people" or "spirit of a nation" which Hegel saw as the main force guiding peoples' actions, which in turn were a part of the greater Weltgeist, the world spirit. Each Volksgeist, and the greater Weltgeist in turn, inexorably followed a pattern of development from "primitive" ideas toward the highest and most enlightened form of ideology as Hegel saw it: the liberal democracy.
Karl Marx thought that Hegel was on to something, but that he had also gotten important things wrong. For one, Geist was not something that uniformly operated across all of history: what Hegel had been unwittingly describing was specifically the modus operandi of the capitalist society in which he lived. It was also not a matter of pure ideas influencing and driving humans, but rather the "impersonal domination" at the heart of capitalism was based on an interlocking system of incentives (the promise of potential reward) and threats of punishment for deviation, with the threat of starvation underpinning everything. And what made this system of domination "impersonal" was the fact that the personal will of a ruler or collective wills of an upper class was not required to sustain the system - capitalist behavior patterns reinforce themselves. In a society where the necessities of survival and social mobility are produced and distributed as items for trade, everyone's ability to act is limited by the dictates of the market, which require people to produce commodities to sell or sell their ability to work as a commodity itself in order to receive value to trade for necessities and avoid starvation, thus intrinsically chaining peoples' survival to the continuous reproduction of the commodity system that threatens it. Because a threat to the efficient flow of capital is also potentially a threat to one's survival via the capitalist order, people - even workers - especially in areas of highly developed capitalism, are also organically incentivized to defend the system, without the need for direct ideological enforcement. The roles of capitalist society into which people are pressed - workers and capitalists - are what Marx calls character masks, forms of activity that deny one's own need in favor of the greater need of the system.
Personally, at least, I think that the concept of impersonal domination can also extend to systems other than capitalism - and even in a system of the most direct, personal domination, I think there are logical structures inherent to power itself which themselves dominate and are to the detriment of the powerful in the end (which is not to say that the powerful "suffer more" than the ruled). I don't have a worked-out argument for this, but I feel that Marx's own writing gives at least some support to this concept - specifically in his comparison between capitalist fetishism and the "misty realms of religion", where "the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race". Religion, then, might be said to constitute a form of impersonal domination.
Symbolon is the Greek origin of the word "symbol", which in premodern times also meant the record of a promise or a debt, but in Middle Ages Christendom also took on a more mystical meaning: a symbolon was an object that served as a material embodiment of God. This meaning informs my use of the word. In capitalism, the social relationship or abstract social form of value in trade must take on a concrete existence so that it can be manipulated in the real world: the form of commodities and money. Thus the concrete form of money which we can interact with (even if it is electronic rather than paper or gold) in a sense is a connection to the ineffable, immaterial thing that is a social relationship.
The ontological break(s)
It is known that some occult phenomena can produce situations where events seem to obey different rules than what we're familiar with - not merely alternate laws of physics, but circumstances where 2+2 can seem to equal 5, and other such strangenesses regarding the nature of existence (ontology). However, whether such phenomena are "simply" the result of complicated manipulations obeying otherwise our own "ontological axioms" or whether it is truly possible for different "axioms" to govern different parts of the pancosmos remains an open question among theorists.
Heavenly domain(s)
The fact that magic systems vary from world to world also means that magic users trained in certain regions or possessing power items from those regions often find their powers fizzling out if they enter a universe beholden to different physical laws, or a space which lies outside the domain of their patron beings. This is not necessarily a major problem for magical things that have a well-known and cheaply obtainable manufactured equivalent in other cosmoi (universes), or skills which can be trivially learned, but it can create difficulties for magic users requiring the use of many greater powers demanding more involved learning or more expensive manufactures, who must routinely travel between cosmoi or whose services are needed urgently on some business across hyperspace. This can be addressed through (typically expensive or restricted) skill downloads, as well as through the pursuit of occult powers with the most expansive domains of effectiveness.
MAGIC AT SCALE: SOCIAL ENGINEERING & THE INDUSTRIAL OCCULT
Magic in Okanverse is not simply a tool wielded by individual practitioners nor a "competitor" per se with "technology" in some kind of struggle for hegemony, but is employed at industrial scales both in synergy with better-understood "conventional" technological processes as well as in service of unique ends not otherwise possible.
Although the mechanisms underlying occult phenomena may remain poorly understood, harnessing their effects is not necessarily so, and occult phenomena are incorporated into many industrial and domestic processes, machines, appliances, and items in Known Space. In some ways the development of "magitech" can be somewhat likened to the science of medicine in the real world today - most drugs are developed by selecting promising-looking candidates from a batch of random chemicals, while the exact biochemical means by which they affect humans are often unclear, or even unknown. Still, we use them because they have been shown to work through experimental trial.
Office witches and arcane chatbots
Because so much of magic involves manipulating the social fabric, occult industries engaged in "social engineering" often require large networks of participants who can act out certain behaviors toward one another and social relationships that satisfy the invocation criteria for desired effects. Often this involves sub-sentient AIs, but "ritual participant" is also a common class of low-wage job posting, or otherwise typically delegated to the underclasses. (Some social rituals can specifically require wealthier and/or more affluent participants, but they are, of course, typically better compensated and looked after.) An additional source of ritual participants that are "sentient enough" to qualify as social actors in relevant rituals are people hooked into "processing time warehouses", virtual or physical sites where people - often poor workers in debt to pay off replacement parts and medical technician costs - sell VR-mediated labor or even directly sell processing time on their cyberbrains and the use of their analytical faculties to various contractors.
In many cases, occult social activities can be entirely "warehoused" away from the public in their own facilities - offices, covens, private intranets, etc, where AIs and transhumans alike act out highly tailored social behaviors. Although not always so uncanny, it's an often apt comparison to imagine a forum populated solely by spambots endlessly hustling one another, carrying out this strange form of social relationship for no obvious benefit; alternately, the atmosphere of a town or other social gathering whose inhabitants have "gone wrong", acting out nonsensical behaviors.
At the same time, much of occult social engineering must be done in a way that involves the public, tapping into the wider fabric. This can be "covert" as well as "overt" - occult social rituals may be, and often are, incorporated into an organization's public-facing activities without telling the public. One can imagine a customer service line staffed by bots that talk according to specific scripts that, in carrying out a certain (if brief) relationship with the customer, satisfy some invocation criterion; this could also involve convincing the customer to carry out certain actions and behaviors that an uninformed customer might not recognize the strangeness of, but are clearly unnecessary to any trained technician. On the more renegade side, hackers could go war-dialing thousands of phones in an area, in hopes of catching enough off-guard callers to initiate their own occult conversation script, or to briefly link callers together into a network architecture that satisfies some occult criterion.
The other side of the social engineering coin is when occult manipulations act upon or even outright change social relationships and individual behaviors in turn. For instance, a company's engineers may be tasked with
- calling on entities who can manipulate the movement of money and commodities in subtle ways (redirecting goods, fabricating goods out of nowhere in certain circumstances, causing preternatural productivity gains, or slowdowns for one's rivals to name a few more mundane possibilities),
- subtle meddling in the course of actions given certain events (if I give out a "lucky dollar", events will be arranged such that I will always get 5 dollars back),
- suggestion, mind control, or cognitive alteration of rivals,
- causing certain kinds of social interaction or relationship to trigger certain beneficial, deleterious, or benign consequences - one might attempt to target this at the enemy organization, to a certain area, or even unleash such effects indiscriminately (see "loading" and "poisoning" for further ruminations on this sort of thing),
- "rewriting" relationships (a rival now suddenly remembers that you have always been good friends, and details of your lives are arranged to fit the narrative),
- or seemingly even alter the "nature" of transactions themselves, producing strange situations beneficial to the company's accounting department where 2+2 really does seem to equal 5, with corresponding consequences in the broader world
- to name some possibilities. The most powerful such manipulations are difficult to create and sustain, the effects of more subtle manipulations can be difficult to verify even for the perpetrators, and they are not infallible, nor impenetrable - but they are possible, and in many cases, documented.
The social occult may also operate not only on the basis of individual people considered as groups, but "between and upon organizations themselves" - occult activities may be targeted to or based upon the specific activity of certain organizations or kinds of organization (at least, to whatever degree the organization qualifies or can be robustly targeted as far as the activation criteria of the occult process is concerned), such as in international conflicts, targeting certain forms of legal entity (an occult injunction against some form of investment vehicle), etc.
Occult statecraft
Occult social engineering at the greatest scales often involves the action of the state: enacting and enforcing policies and laws, designing or pushing the construction of habitats, infrastructures, and living spaces, and patterns of settlement and development that bring about certain forms of social relationship and organization suitable for magical invocations. As a rough example, people familiar with Fullmetal Alchemist might recall how the Amestrian capital is built in the form of a massive alchemy circle...
"Loading" and "poisoning"
One of the more advanced fields of occult engineering investigates ways that certain categories of activity can be made associated with some non-obvious effect, "loading" a type action with new supernatural implications. For instance, a certain keyphrase - which might even be part of everyday conversation ("How are you doing", perhaps) - might be loaded with the new consequence that every time it's said, a frog falls out of thin air nearby. Eating beans with certain movements of one's spoon might invite the watchful eye of some immaterial entity into a room. And so on. In general, to name a few possibilities, loading can be used to improve industrial or ecological processes, vehicle function, or as part of social manipulation, or to give people certain abilities. In a sense, loading might be thought of as creating new kinds of magical relationship, new "hidden sympathies" that can be invoked by magic users and engineers.
Much as magic is not a single type of system but a melange of different systems, "loading" does not involve one single set of practices which can reliably be used to load any action with certain consequences. There exist a wide variety of methods drawing on different research in both conventional and occult fields. In some cases, loading might involve convincing certain entities to monitor an area for a desired type of action that will serve as their trigger, then respond accordingly; other kinds of loading draw on sub-sentient occult processes, or some mixture.
When loading has detrimental consequences, it's called "poisoning". While poisoning can be, and routinely is, used offensively, it is also a common byproduct of loading that is conducted with poor understanding of the potential side/ripple effects and how to prevent them, or neglect (such as, of course, in favor of profits). When used in combat, poisoning can take many forms from highly localized poisonings such as poisoning certain life-processes necessary for survival in the room of an assassination victim, "scorched earth" poisonings that leave an entire region uninhabitable at the level of basic life-processes or industrial processes, or - far more frequently - gradual and subtle mass poisonings that are often some mixture of deliberate poisoning and upper-class carelessness, or part of a system of colonial management. Spillover effects from a major occult engineering program sited in the vicinity of some housing projects may cause routine social behaviors in the projects to become mildly poisoned, perhaps drawing the attention of inscrutable entities who cause a spike in unexplained disappearances, or outbreaks of supernatural diseases damaging the social fabric and fortunes of those living there, and other things.
Tailored fates, fate-based social planning, "astrological engineering"
One of the most complex, involved, and notable applications of occult engineering is the investigation and even deliberate design of "astrologies" - systems of "fate" that people can be tied to based on some arbitrary circumstance of their birth, or other criteria. Like loading, astrological engineering is not a single system, but draws on many disparate fields of research. In some cases, spiritual entities may be involved in arranging coincidences such as to try and steer peoples' lives in certain ways; in other cases sub-sentient, often even stranger and less-understood, mechanisms may be involved. Astrological engineering is seen by many in the halls of power - some quietly, some openly - as a holy grail of social control, envisioning perfectly managed social orders in which the bureaucracies and the markets run without a hint of rebellion. In practice, things have so far played out much more messily. Tailoring fates with a fine degree of control is also an extremely challenging task - even verifying whether sequences of events can be attributed to changes in "fate" or unrelated causes is rarely a question with obvious answers. Much more commonly, universes are discovered where a system of fates already exists, and is found to be useful to those in power. Large-scale pushes to encourage (or force) development in and migration to such cosmoi have taken place.
ASTRO-WITCHES AND CYBER-WIZARDS
Witches, along with every other imaginable way to say "magic user", are a fact of life in Known Space and in most places make up a large chunk if not the entirety of the population, to some degree or other. There is no single way to be a witch, and magic is a daily reality even for those who don't routinely work primarily with it. Enchanted items, spells, magical machinery and other things are ubiquitous across the pancosmos.
Charms, sigils, and spells: magical tools, weapons, and defenses
Professional and common witchcraft
The incense altar and the arcane washing machine: domestic magic
THE BANALITY OF HORROR
For the majority of people in the world, horror of some kind is already a daily reality - the flashiest violent crimes are ultimately spillovers of the routine horrors of overwork, of being policed, of "warehousing", of extermination that take place daily in factories, farms, poor and racialized neighborhoods, and crowded prisons and internment camps. Supernatural horrors in turn, ultimately, tend not to be merely freak incidents or otherwise meaningless incursions by the unseen worlds into ours, but outgrowths and novel expressions of the daily horrors of society and society's interface with the unseen realms.
Even in the real world, notions of supernatural horror reflect on and develop with the miseries of everyday existence, but in Okanverse, supernatural horrors are also a verifiable fact of life for many - especially the underprivileged. Poor districts routinely experience occult "pollution", plagues, and other spillover effects from occult industries and large-scale initiatives; unfathomable horrors have been unleashed in warfare and counter-insurgency. Governments quarantining an outbreak of paranormal activity might find that the rashes of mysterious deaths and injuries are seemingly linked by friendships and interpersonal associations, and shut down employment except through strictly relationship-sanitized interactions, monitored by software to screen them for involvement with customers that appears to trigger outbreak-related activity in the unseen realms. Keep your head down, stay quiet, and turn off your feeds, because the walls are listening in this housing block, and they don't like what they hear; or maybe you find one day that your coworkers in the shitty pizza joint start behaving strangely, as if their minds are being affected by something otherworldly. There is a strange disorientingness of everything - yet for many, this is just reality.
PARA-NORMALITY IN THE FAR FUTURE
People haven't stopped glimpsing flashes of the unexplained and the supernatural in the transhuman, spacefaring, cosmos-hopping future, not least because much of it all is verifiably real. Even known forms of magic have rules or at least partially-understood guidelines, by which the "truly" supernatural refuses to abide; and there are those phenomena whose nature is simply unidentified - shadowy outlines and subtle wrongnesses caught in the corner of one's eye, noises of unclear origin, unexplained traces in large-scale monitoring systems. And in an age of cameras and data recording devices more capable and deployable than ever, there remain corners and crevices to hide in, both in recording and perception, in abundance.
An incomplete outline of commonly sighted and hyped-up paranormal phenomena and common (scientific or otherwise) beliefs surrounding the paranormal is as follows:
Metric ghosts
With the advent of high-resolution gravity wave astronomy, it became possible to monitor the skies not only for titanic cosmic events like black hole and neutron star mergers or even the more moderate gravity wave emissions from close-orbiting massive stellar objects, but to search the skies for gravitational wave signatures given off by sub-planetary disturbances or spacecraft using metric technology - the basis of gravity manipulation, reactionless propulsion and FTL travel. Metric ghosts are traces in the gravitational monitoring data that do not appear to correspond to any type of metric technology used by known operators, or any natural phenomenon. Gravity wave astronomy is partly done by a massive, dedicated network of monitoring stations dotting every star system in known space, but because metric drives are sensitive to gravitational interference (they cannot work properly too close to a strong gravity source), they can also be used as a sort of gravity sensor, allowing individual pilots and astrogators to make their own local observations and sightings.
There are many reported forms of metric ghost, and while many are thought to be traces of natural phenomena, many more are the subject of fierce speculation by scientists, intelligence officials, and paranormal enthusiasts. Occasionally, traces thought to correspond to warp bubbles and similar structures of truly incredible scale have been sighted passing through known space, even close to populated systems. Some speculate that these may be large world-ships belonging to advanced civilizations, while others imagine even stranger possibilities, but in most cases, nothing is known for certain.
UFOs
UFO sightings are alive and well, as much (if not more) among spacers as among more infrequent travelers. Unexplained lights in the sky at the fringes of discernability, moving in disconcerting ways, remain a staple of paranormal fancy, though many new natural and occult explanations have emerged in the intervening millennia - not to mention that aliens are known to exist.
Spacer legends
Shadow people, ghosts, other apparitions
Data artifacts and "haunted processes"
Cryptids and Beings
Hauntings and offbeat locations
Websites and virtual worlds
Haunted cyberware and forbidden knowledge
Conspiracy theories and crank science
OVERVIEW OF THE PANCOSMOS
As outlined earlier, there is not just one kind of universe in the vastness of everything. The pancosmos (multiverse) can be divided into several broad types of universe with different means of travel between them. Permutations are one kind, and "travel" between permutations is more akin to mind uploading to a different body than physical travel pe se. Time travel would create branching parallel universes containing alternate timelines, but transhumans are not capable of time travel, and these alternate histories do not exist in a physical "space" relative to each other that can be crossed by a spaceship in the usual sense. Instead, most physical travel across the pancosmos takes place within what's called the Bulk, a higher-dimensional "hyperspace" where "branes", lower-dimensional universes, float around each other.
HYPERSPACE, OR "THE BULK"
"Metric technology" - the basis of FTL travel, reactionless propulsion, and gravity control - is also required to travel outside a brane, creating a bubble of 3-dimensional space where survivable physical laws can operate. This is essentially a warp bubble, and so spacecraft typically need to be far in the outer solar system to initiate a cross-hyperspace jump. While many universes are relatively nearby in hyperspace, there is a significant limit on multiversal exploration: a spacecraft inside a warp bubble experiences no time dilation, and thus feels the full length of any journey. Thus, traveling to universes that are more than light-weeks away in hyperspace would require highly survivable (long-lived uncrewed probes) and/or well-stocked spacecraft prepared for an extended voyage. Once a spacetime tunnel link such as a wormhole or Krasnikov tube is established to a new cosmos, though, future travelers do not need to worry about this issue, in principle.
However, there also exist "network branes", "terminal worlds", or "border worlds". These are 3-space cosmoi (universes) or other large spacetime structures that are aligned, "bent" or "folded" in hyperspace such that parts of them almost touch, or otherwise lie close to, other cosmoi, allowing for relativistic fast travel to a desired cosmos in the "network". Speculation abounds in many cases as to whether these border worlds are natural, or artificially arranged.
Detecting objects in hyperspace, such as other cosmoi, at the very least requires gravity wave astronomy, which can be carried out via three main routes:
- Observing changes in the motion of large astronomical objects that lend themselves to ultra-precise measurements, such as pulsars, and particularly close-orbiting pairs such as the Hulse-Taylor binary
- Laser interferometry - which measure changes in distance between parts of the observatory, due to spacetime warping - such as the LIGO observatories on Earth today
- Measuring stresses in a warp bubble, wormhole, Krasnikov tube, or other spacetime distortions - which are sensitive to gravitational interference - created by metric technology
Higher-dimensional cosmoi and even hyperspace-native matter are also possibilities. Hyperspace-native matter, or at least matter that can travel freely in hyperspace, would add much to the hyperspace astronomy toolkit, but I'm undecided on whether hyperspace-native matter exists in Okanverse's region.
Hyperspace astronomy is further complicated by the need for extreme computational power to store and process images of higher-dimensional objects. The size of an image increases exponentially with each added dimension: a 2D icon of 10^2 pixels or 100 pixels of data, becomes 10^3 = 1000 pixels if we wish to create a similar icon out of voxels (a 3-dimensional image), and so on.
Additionally, it is also possible to use metric technology to create permanent or semi-permanent installations in hyperspace - warp bubbles functioning as "pocket" or "basement universes". These may be arbitrarily small or large. Basement cosmoi can be used tactically to create a military base or habitat that is not ordinarily reachable except with FTL technology - among many other possibilities. It is also thought that "true" basement universes could be created by a civilization equipped with powerful enough technology, initiating a Big Bang and rapid cosmological inflation in the new universe, even custom-tailoring the physics of the new world. This remains far out of transhuman reach, but advanced societies may exist that can exploit such possibilities.
SYMMETRIC GROUPS: THE PERMUTATION METAVERSE
Because permutations are made of seemingly meaningless "patterns" in our world that in fact constitute a (mostly) causally disconnected world with a seemingly separate set of physical laws experienced by its inhabitants, permutations are a broad category of cosmoi, since the "patterns" in question can be many things: fluctuations in the quantum vacuum, movements in the air and water, etc. Permutations can even be to some extent "integrated" with our own world - perhaps a planet in one permutation also exists, or corresponds strongly to a similar object, in our permutation.
The idea that alternate physics and other worlds could be locked away in seemingly meaningless patterns right under our noses (again, virtual worlds running on the hunks of doped silicon and plastic we call computers, or even worlds of the imagination stored in watery carbon substrate we call humans could be taken as a rough analogy) makes permutations particularly useful as an explanatory tool for strange, esoteric, "magical" effects.
COMPUTATIONAL MULTIVERSE?
Another degree of freedom for imagining strange other worlds is introduced by pancomputationalism - the notion, roughly speaking, that existence might be a program running on a vast natural computer (or that physics can essentially be treated as though such were the case). Perhaps spacetime is constructed from an endless network of computing nodes, computational "spacetime atoms" forming a "tensor network" linked by quantum entanglement as in loop quantum gravity. I don't really know how well this checks against the physics, but perhaps we could imagine we are not the only "program" on the machine, enabling a pancosmos of different worlds stored in the same spacetime-computer. In a sense, this might be considered a subset of the permutation metaverse.
TIME TRAVEL?
Transhumans are incapable of time travel; their FTL technology obeys "chronology protection"-like restrictions, preventing the creation of any circumstance that could cause a time paradox. However, this only resembles chronology protection in the usual sense - in the contemporary physical theory of 5555 AD, time travel is thought to be possible, if other barriers resisting the creation of closed timelike curves and the like could be overcome. When a time paradox would be created it should instead fork off a parallel universe to contain the alternate history thus generated. Still, no travelers from the future have yet been reported, although visitors from alternate human societies are known.
EXPLAINING COMMON SCI-FI & FANTASY TROPES
BUT WHY WOULD THEMATICALLY SIMILAR WORLDS BE LOCATED CLOSE TO EACH OTHER IN THE MULTIVERSE AT ALL?
One of the big problems I've identified when trying to take a "hard sci-fi" approach to a world where any crossover can happen is justifying why all these different worlds would be available to each other for crossovers in the first place. Even if they all exist in the same reality, there's no reason why any two worlds that share thematic similarities (such as the presence of humans, or something more or less resembling modern society with China, the USA, India, etc) should be anywhere near each other in the multiverse. It's not as though we expect Alpha Centauri to have a literal alternate Earth, and that the similarity only decreases as you get farther away. Indeed, even if our universe is infinite and thus every possibility presumably repeats itself somewhere, the nearest copy of our planet should be unfathomably far away - many times farther out than the limit of our Hubble volume, where the expansion of spacetime relative to us exceeds lightspeed, so we could never even reach it anyway unless we had true FTL and not "apparent FTL" (see the FTL subsection under the Technology section for more on the distinction between these).
Permutations and the pancomputational landscape provide possible solutions - after all, these are pancosmoi of fantastic worlds that live under our noses, in patterns all around us, so we might imagine that there are at least a few alternate Earths lying relatively nearby us in such realms. Still, I feel like this isn't likely to give us exactly the worldbuilding setup we'd want. So far, the solution that seems most robust to me is to assume some kind of alien interlopers / "precursors" / whatever who go around meddling in such things, linking physically disparate yet thematically similar locales to one another in the multiverse on some inscrutable whim. Still, this isn't exactly out of place for Okanverse - there is no shortage of inscrutable entities to go around, and strange physics and occult mechanisms to make their jobs easier or promote such in the first place - and doesn't necessarily make for uninteresting worldbuilding. There's no reason we can't keep endeavoring to answer the question of "why would these inscrutable aliens bother doing this kind of stuff?" even if for now, the exact reasons remain as unclear to us, the worldbuilders, as to our characters themselves.
DELOREANS, DEATH STARS, "HUMAN NATURES": NOTES ON HANDLING STARKLY DIFFERENT WORLDBUILDING GOALS & DIFFERENT ONTOLOGIES
While there are many cases where encounters between different fictional universes can be written fairly easily without inviting too much fridge logic or far-reaching worldbuilding implications, there are also many cases where reconciling the worldbuilding goals and/or underlying assumptions of two different worlds in a "hard SF" way takes a lot of work, or may even seem outright impossible. For example, even as open-ended as I try to make Okanverse, my worldbuilding doesn't lend itself well to superheroes and villains who can menace the fate of everything in existence every other week, or Star Wars-esque galactic empires spread across entire galaxy clusters who can throw around Death Stars at a moment's notice to settle the scores of nations, or Back to the Future / Doctor Who-esque "timey wimey" time travel where the future can just be altered by changing the past, and there's little worry about time paradoxes, and other weird stuff. Obviously if conflicts between superheroes could destroy everything at any time in Okanverse, then clashes of superheroes would quickly overshadow the more expansive political drama between peoples, polities and social systems, for example. Yet we want at least small-scale traffic between these worlds to be possible, in order to have crossover stories between any two kinds of world. How can we envision the behavior of a consistent multiverse that also allows for all these different kinds of world to exist at once?
I think that, roughly speaking, one can identify at least three basic areas where differences in the worldbuilding goals of two settings are likely to cause problems for crossovers: physical assumptions, power creep or "scale creep", and ontological assumptions.
Physical assumptions
I think this is the easiest to straightforwardly resolve but the hardest to explain; feel free to skip ahead. Essentially, while a lot of changes in physical law can be accounted for in a relatively "straightforward" manner (what if the electron mass was a little higher? what if the weak nuclear force was weaker? etc.) there are many common sci-fi tropes that are much more difficult to fit into a "realistic" world as I understand it, even by tweaking physics. Time travel is one of the best examples (and I think Doctor Who's "timey wimey ball" probably best captures soft SF time travel stories' relationship to any "realistic" notions of time travel).
Fundamental differences in the way that time and space work are, I think, the most vexing physical differences between worldbuilds to reconcile because such a difference means there may not even be a natural correspondence between the flow of time in one universe versus another, at all. If this sounds too abstract, what it means is that, say that you have a setting that obeys relativity, and a setting where relativity doesn't apply (so that you can have sci-fi rockets that accelerate to infinite speed for example). In relativity, the flow of time is relative to the observer - there is what's called "relativity of simultaneity" which means that observers moving at different velocities can observe the same events happening in different orders, and all of them are equally correct. In a non-relativistic setting, the flow of time could be the same everywhere in the universe. In relativity, the passage of 1 second depends on the observer; in a non-relativistic world, the passage of 1 second depends on something else entirely. There is a fundamental difference in the nature of time.
So there is no obvious mapping, to my (limited) knowledge, between events during 1 second in a relativistic world and events during 1 second in a non-relativistic one. Perhaps each moment in an NR world, from the perspective of an R universe, is even spread out over an infinite length of time! If that's the case, then any interaction between worlds seems completely impossible, if it's even meaningful to say that the NR world could actually exist. The same problem holds true for "timey wimey" worlds.
The method I've arrived at to deal with this is by saying that such worlds must be located in alternate permutations, and cannot be part of the same brane pancosmos as Okanverse (or vice-versa). More specifically, because of the unclear / arbitrary relationship between the passage of time in non-relativistic worlds vs. relativistic ones, NR worlds can only be compatible with R worlds because they can be computed by R-world structures, which means that they must be in a sense "simulated" worlds running on a natural computer (so they could be one of the "other programs" running in the pancomputational spacetime computing nodes, or perhaps they're running on some other natural computing structures that arise in a permutation).
In other words, think of typical physics simulations in video games today - almost all games today are non-relativistic worlds, where the trajectories of objects follow a simple universe-wide passage of time that applies the same way everywhere in the simulation. Yet our computers, living in a relativistic world, are capable of computing these NR-worlds so we can interact with them and vice-versa. Being "simulated" also does not rule out such universes' ability to have esoteric and powerful effects on our world - they too could be responsible for strange magics and abilities in our realm, for example.
Power creep / "scale creep"
Scale is a common distinction between settings that can be difficult to reconcile directly, for writing crossover scenarios between "low-power" and "high-power" worlds, when you don't want to invite a rewrite of the low-powered setting's "premise":
- Of powers available to people and organizations through technology and/or magic, and their distribution: A society of augmented transhumans versus a society of "mundane" humans? A primarily "mundane" society with an upper caste of superhumans with world-shattering powers?
- Scale of populations, infrastructure, and materiel in setting: Limited to small countries? One planet? A few star systems? Galactic empire?
- Technological / magical horizons: Pseudomedieval technostasis? Modern day technological progress? Star Wars industrial-spacefaring technostasis? Post-Singularity accelerando?
In general, settings with fantastically greater "power" or scale in some aspect risk inviting a sort of "power creep" when it comes to crossovers: If legendary heroes and villains can menace everything in existence every other week, then where does that leave a setting focused on more expansive political conflicts between people of roughly the same power level? If your empire can lob Death Stars at whim and summon the military might of entire galaxies, couldn't they easily overrun a setting where the focal conflict takes place over only a few star systems or one planet?
On one hand, the worlds could simply be separated by great enough barriers / distances that it's not worth the time for the high-power world to overrun the low-power, or the low-power world may be hidden and only accessible through little-known means; alternatively the low-power world may be known to the high-power, but its resources and powerbrokering are of little interest to the high-power world's big movers and shakers.
Deeper physical limitations can also be invoked to make travel between worlds too difficult or otherwise non-worthwhile to justify large-scale conquests or syncretization (while allowing for some major collaboration over whatever multiversal MacGuffin is at stake), or to make it such that high powers in one world apply differently in another, and so forth. For example, the scale of Known Space in Okanverse pales compared to Star Wars' inhabited galaxy, potentially inviting the idea of gigantic galactic fleets rolling up and effortlessly smoking everything in Known Space (setting aside distinctions between how combat works and other factors), although the Galactic Empire doesn't seem to engage in much multiverse-hopping so they're probably safe from this as long as the crossover is small. Alternatively, we might ask - perhaps Okanverse has superior firepower, despite its relative small size. Why could they not simply travel to the Star Wars world, set up shop, and start building up such galactic empires of their own?
There are clear differences between the natures of technological development in Okanverse vs. Star Wars that give an idea of how we could set up limitations preventing this sort of thing. Star Wars and most popular sci-fi milieux are rather limited in terms of transhuman technology and in many other regards outside of constructing large spaceships and jetting around the galaxy at hyperspeed - perhaps it's the case that the laws of physics in Star Wars have a softer cap on the development of flashy, "physical powers" such as propulsion technology, while having a harder cap on the development of subtler powers like computation and cyberware. In that case, traveling to a world with stricter physical limits on cyberware could kill transhumans who aren't built to the necessary specifications, making it an undesirable target for multiversal expansion. (Even if you did build a compatible body, you'd be trapped in this world's more limited horizon of technological development.)
Ontological assumptions
Alternatively, you might have two worldbuilds that make fundamentally different assumptions about the nature of existence, of society, of "humanity", and so forth. Perhaps in one setting, "true words" are said to exist, and Platonic "pure forms" can be invoked to summon things in the real world, while another setting runs on a more "materialist" ontology where matter is not a secondary phenomenon to ideal forms, and a table must be built from atoms, instead of being pulled from the space of pure concepts. Or perhaps in one setting, capitalism is portrayed an unequivocally good thing that everyone loves. (Not a world I'd like to live in by any means, but it's the easiest example I could think of...)
Of course, you could simply say that (especially when it comes to social systems), "this lore was written from a certain standpoint that may not be grasping the full story of how things work, or may be a propagandized account written to support the ruling class," etc. However, you could also take such alternate ontologies at face value - at least partially. On the one hand, you could imagine that perhaps different parts of existence can be governed by genuinely different "ontological axioms", so that maybe in this sector of the pancosmos, human nature really exists and that nature is to just fight and kill each other for profit forever - but I don't like that route. Alternatively, such as with the "geist" concept, perhaps it's possible for some natural conditions to arise where certain social forms are promoted or suppressed in a region due to the pattern governing matter in that region.
For alternate ontologies extending beyond the social, such as concerning the nature of matter versus ideal form and so forth, one can imagine that perhaps they exist in a "simulated" way like universes with alternate relationships to time, running on some natural computer in another permutation or elsewhere in the pancomputational landscape; or perhaps they are made of matter with which we could interact, but that matter acts in ways - and is structured into larger-scale complex forms and structures - in a starkly different way from what we're familiar with. One might perhaps look to virtual worlds for inspiration on how universes might work where "pure concepts" are the basis of matter and can be invoked - in our real world, for instance, something like the quality of "nutrition" is a product of complex interactions between trillions of particles and systems defining the relationships between those particles, which do not not inherently have anything to do with human life or satisfying the needs of some being called a "human". However, in a virtual world, the category "nutrition" might correspond to just a single variable assigned to certain specific entities, which is incremented or decremented based on their interaction with objects of category "food" within a certain timeframe.
Such alternate ontologies could render it fatal for us to travel to these worlds, or perhaps meaningless - maybe "sentient beings" there would be quite different sorts of thought-forms from what's responsible for sentience in our world.
PANCOSMIC FEATURES, ODDITIES, LEGENDS OF NOTE
Picnic Worlds
TECHNOLOGY
TRANSHUMANITY: BIO-NANO-ROBOTICS, THE DIGITAL SELF
Modern "humans" are all immortal robots - unlike many other transhuman settings, "baseline humans" no longer exist, and nobody - not even the most conservative humanists - pines for the good old days when humans were truly human or some such nonsense. Okanverse is emphatically not a setting that values stories about the horror (think of the children!) of "man blending with machine", the quest of un-emotional robots to "become more human", nor how cybernetic prosthetics and computerization "takes away our humanity" and other such fake-deep, played-out science fiction schlock.
Principles & potentials of life as a robot
A person's consciousness exists in the cyberbrain, typically housed inside the chest or wherever is deepest in the body, for maximum protection. (Side note: modern computers and robotics are largely not vulnerable to EMP attacks; humans do not have to worry about such threats any more than any Homo sapien.) Modern consciousnesses are highly modifiable: memories can be made highly stable and indexed, allowing people to remember things indefinitely, cataloguing experiences and thoughts by tagging and metadata, offloading them to a secondary or external memory system, isolating and deleting thoughts if necessary, transmitting thoughts and blueprints for cognitive structures over the internet with software capable of cleanly installing new memories and firmware without disrupting other memories or creating strange associations and rendering the installed knowledge useless due to failure by the installer to properly map similar concepts to one another.
The concept map - a map that traces out the relationships between concepts as a person understands them, how the idea of a "dog" is constructed in the mind out of associations amongst logical propositions and sensorimotor memory of "dogs" one has seen - is an important tool in neurotechnology, and modern cyberbrain software is capable of reading out the concept map of any person and cross-referencing it with a library of "standard" concepts for the purposes of memory transfer. To maintain accuracy, the concept map must be updated over time; humans may spend a few hours a week in a sort of "rest mode" as their mental processes are slowed to accommodate the processing load of the mapping software.
Art is easier than ever, and just as cyberbrain software is able to read thoughts, it is necessarily also able to visualize them and create a full sensory experience from one's imagination, although the results of translating imagination to paper (so to speak) differ between algorithms used and preferences set by the user, and imagination itself takes training to create detailed and polished scenes, which are also typically edited after the product comes out of imagination-draft. Longer-form and more complex works, like narratives, films, games, etc. cannot all be imagined in one go, either. Even so, such advances have led to massive proliferations of the visual and musical arts. It's also quite common for peoples' apartments, vehicles, spacecraft, etc. to be painted with some sort of personal designs or murals.
New realms of physical prowess have also been unlocked by robotic bodies, over time - aside from being able to connect a cyberbrain to a mech or vehicle, human-size bodies can jump great heights, scale walls, punch through concrete, etc. Limbs that serve as highly versatile multitools, hands with many small fingers for detailed, dextrous manipulation or interfacing - all are possible, even feasible.
Humans can eat, and though do not strictly need food for energy, their self-repair systems need raw materials to manufacture feedstock, and eating has never really gone out of style. However, feedstock can be supplied by other means (plugging tubes into ports), energy can easily be supplied by cables, and bodies are capable of storing large reservoirs of stock, meaning people are no longer chained to the need to eat multiple meals or top off their stock every day, or even week, in principle. Waste rejection is also greatly changed, and much cleaner for modern humans, both in principle and in practice. Unlike eating, shitting has definitely gone out of style. Humans do not need to use the toilet - waste is rendered into clean forms and piped out or removed as a dry solid from an easily accessible bay.
Humans typically feel some kind of pain as an immediate response to dangerous actions or injury, but never debilitating pain. Far more nuanced means of indicating and investigating damage to one's body are available, with cyberbrain-internal readouts and displays flashing relevant information into the mind's eye - heat maps of parts suffering mechanical strain, maps of sensors failing to respond, etc.
Present-day conditions
For most of Known Space, the full potential of modern neurotechnology for personal flourishing unfortunately remains to be realized. All modern states maintain some kind of constraints on knowledge downloading and regulate it through DRM, whether to safeguard the profits of companies who benefit from exclusive skills or more plainly to maintain the superiority of government-approved groups in advanced fields. Much of military training, to give an easy example, is highly policed knowledge that can land someone in serious hot water if caught. (On the other hand, relaxed restrictions or outright mass distribution of knowledge downloads also occasionally takes place, usually to help raise a workforce for large projects or to depress wages in an industry by expanding the labor pool and thus the wage competition. "Baseline" knowledge downloads are also distributed at no or reduced cost for those having children not based on the parent(s') concept template(s), across known space.)
Physical enhancements are also restricted. The state has a vested interest, after all, in not arming the vast majority of its citizens with military-grade punching force and built-in arm rocket launchers. Still, mobility enhancements determined not to be too dangerous to police or constables are frequently available to the public through one means or other, and there are many ways to obtain other enhancements on the sly. Parkour enhancements are popular, for instance, and multitool-equipped arms are practically mandated by some professions. However, physical enhancements do not need to be integrated with the body - external equipment is often much cheaper, less policed, and easier to obtain licensing for if necessary, like exosuits for carrying around large objects.
While physical pain is mostly not a factor in human life, maintenance of the body and cyberbrain are. Most states in the FTU guarantee a "right to life", a state health program that ensures "baseline" maintenance, furnishing of basic spare parts, and life-saving care. High quality is not guaranteed, but it is generally serviceable. In some states, especially in the Mandate, the matter is more complicated and less pleasant. Although basic life-saving provisions are furnished, they must be repaid, and often those unable to get work find themselves effectively forced into extremely low-paying temp labor, while still others are faced with the prospect of selling processing time on their cyberbrain to compute various analytical tasks and forms of clerical work. Others resign themselves to charity "safehouses" where they power down their brains and lie in wait for the charity fund to accumulate enough money to pay for their refurbishment, which may set them back years of lost time when they wake up in the future - if indeed the money comes.
Although one might not expect it, disease remains an unfortunate reality in the robotic world, although not in quite the same ways as it was for flesh-and-blood Homo sapiens. Harmful nanorobotics, chemicals, and other problems (hardware defect, etc), while addressable, even elminable, continue to build up in habitat environments due to inadequate care, funds, resources, etc. invested in cleanup and maintenance. "Grey goo" is not really a worry, as even the best general-purpose molecular assembler technology would require enormous inputs of energy and advances in cooling technology - if it is even possible - to create assemblers capable of truly "eating everything", but "infections" by malfunctioning cultures are a worry. Mental cybersecurity is also a necessity, as both powerful organizations and petty hackers want access to your memories, metadata, concept map, etc. Shady online dealers often promise cheap skill downloads and falsified licensing paperwork that are at best poor quality and often carry a malware payload. Such scams are also particularly common in the market for magical knowledge - and more often than not, the knowledge of "deep magics" that such packages install to buyers are merely superstitious rituals with no real effect.
Background history
Mind uploading was cracked in the 23rd century, although it had been preceded by a progression of great advances in prosthetics, organ manufacturing, gerontology (lifespan extension), direct neural interfacing, machine learning, and nanotech. Mass political upheaval over healthcare and labor, over time, brought these advances to the masses in turn. Various programs of therapy, drugs, and nanorobotics for preventing deterioration of the body, restoring telomerase, etc increasingly became a reality in the mid-21st century, while "brain in a jar"-style robotic bodies became viable in the decades that followed. Fleets of nanorobots, often at least partly biological and grown from the stem cells of the user themself to help ensure biocompatibility, helped clean up aging-related damage to the body while also paving the way for neurological research, as nanoscale instruments could be deployed in the brain non-destructively to investigate the workings of neurons and neural structures in fine detail in a live subject.
Centuries of deliberate work went into untangling the complicated structures behind human cognition, and even basic questions like "how do nerves store information?" remained unresolved for many decades, hindering proposals at the time to recreate the brain by "simply simulating the nerves". Simply simulating the nerves was not necessarily the best approach in itself, either, as digital models of nerve function necessarily involved some abstractions that were difficult to square with reality, necessitating wholly digital workarounds and solutions to map consciousness in the brain most precisely to consciousness on a block of FPGA processors. At the same time, as the building blocks of consciousness were isolated, analyzed, and reproduced, and tools to manipulate them became more widely available, they eventually became fodder for tinkers and waves of research into non-sentient yet reasonably general AI, before mass mind uploading became a reality.
ECOCYBERNETICS: ROBOTIC FORESTS, WIRED TO THE GRID
In the modern day, much like transhumans themselves, any given ecosystem is as much robotic as it is anything else. Turning the tide of climate change and constructing long-term space habitats in the 21st-25th centuries required massive leaps in scientific understanding of how vastly complicated networks of organisms relate to one another and to the stability and properties of the system as a whole, and as knowledge of how to construct and tailor biospheres advanced, "artificial" components could be integrated with the "natural" world with increasing degrees of safety and ease, to the benefit of all - at least potentially. The communists, in particular, saw in ecocybernetics the potential ultimate realization of communist aims: the liberation of all life from domination and suffering, and the provision of all life-forms' needs without the destruction of any other, eliminating predator-prey relationships and transforming all ecosystems into mutually planned and beneficial industrial architectures.
For most of known space, the deeper communist potential of ecocybernetics remains somewhat unrealized. Still, all walks of "non-human" life have seen massive transformations by engineering and infusion with robotics - for instance, while traditional organisms are almost completely made from cells and difficult to repair / heal, engineered organisms and components of cybernetic ecologies can be made modular, highly repairable, and mostly or completely from matter that is not "living" in any sense, such that modifications and repairs, and resource production, pose no threat of harm to anyone. Additionally, the components of the cybernetic ecosystem can communicate and coordinate production, distribution, problem solving, and threat response with each other, as well as submitting higher-level problems to the transhuman ecology maintenance crews. At least, this is how things can work, in principle.
In addition, food production has been completely transformed through the millennia, first as dietary restrictions forced on humankind by climate change and global land use upheaval in the pre-Abduction centuries meant that animal products were largely eliminated from the human diet, with meat products increasingly being sourced from industrial bioreactors instead of livestock, while the rise of reactor-grown microbial food products, engineered "designer proteins" and the gradual infusion and re-engineering of crops with bionanotech meant that in time, both "vegetable products" and "animal products" had decreasingly little to do with the destruction of any organism. Religious dietary restrictions have in many cases evolved or dissipated in light of such changes, such as Jewish restrictions on eating "meat" with "dairy" on Passover, although other bans, like restrictions on the consumption of alcohol (and analogously psychoactive programs), have remained more stable over the millennia.
Along with maintaining Earth-like habitats, the ecological sciences were also put to work in designing completely new kinds of biome to help settle asteroids and other regolith-covered planets and moons, making them friendlier both to more fragile forms of life and heavy machinery. The growth of vacuum flora creates a protective cover over regolith, the soil of asteroids and other airless worlds like the Moon, which is made of microscopically fine dust particles that can creep past many kinds of barrier and damage or destroy machinery, and cause severe health and breathing problems. At the same time, it processes regolith into less dusty forms and assists in harvesting useful resources. Countless strains and "biome starter" packages of vacuum flora are widespread across known space, and have colonized bodies transhumans have never landed on. They blanket asteroids and airless moons in colorful foliage, tended by various strains of macro- and microscopic robot.
ADVANCED MANUFACTURING: BETTER LIVING THROUGH MOLECULAR ASSEMBLY
Although large-scale space travel and settlement have been a reality for three millennia now, it is only in the last millennium that space has become "pedestrianized" - that is to say, the masses of people are frequently able to own their own spacecraft capable of fast travel within a solar system (interplanetary travel times of a few days / weeks). This was made possible by advances in molecular assembly, the practice of using nanorobots to precisely manipulate atoms and molecules to manufacture components that are extremely small, or else extremely sensitive to minuscule errors in construction. Molecular assembly has been a reality since pre-Abduction, but it was historically confined to spotless and expensive clean-room conditions in order to avoid contamination and damage to the nanoscale equipment. In time, both the technologies for obtaining clean-room conditions became cheaper and more miniaturized, and the robotics themselves were made hardier, so that manufacturing and repairing products with ultra-low error tolerance could be done at both greater and smaller scales more cheaply than ever. This allowed fast spacecraft to become larger, and small spacecraft to become faster, as costs of magnetic confinement coils, high-power laser components, and other high-power, high-precision parts of fusion "torch" engines and reactionless metric drives dropped.
THERE AND BACK AGAIN: INTERSTELLAR PROPULSION TECH
The jumptender Asteraceae
The basis of FTL in Okanverse is what's called metric technology. "Metric" (roughly speaking) refers to the shape, or curvature (or "warp") of spacetime in general relativity, so metric drives are also warp drives, capable of creating a warp bubble to envelop the ship and travel at high speed. Wormholes are also created by warping space. So the same technology that enables one kind of FTL enables all kinds, as well as reactionless propulsion and gravity control - since gravity is, after all, a kind of warping of spacetime.
In the real universe, to the best of my knowledge, warping spacetime sufficiently for "sci-fi" level reactionless propulsion requires immense and ultra-dense quantities of exotic matter, far beyond anything I personally feel we're likely to develop even thousands of years in the future, assuming such matter even exists and can be harnessed: asteroidal or even planetary masses' worth of exotic matter must be obtained at comparable densities to neutronium, in order to produce sharp enough space warping (strong gravitational effects) to create structures out of spacetime like a warp bubble or wormhole. (Think, perhaps, of a black hole - such an exotic spacetime structure is only possible with matter crushed to unimaginable density. Gravity is a very weak force, after all: even mundane effects like the gravity of our own Earth require the immense mass of a whole planet.) In Okanverse, reactionless propulsion and FTL travel are only accessible to transhuman engineering through alternate laws of physics and/or roundabout means of obtaining the necessary energies, which will be explained ahead.
Metric drives and stargate-class wormholes are susceptible to gravitational interference, and in many cosmoi they must be operated far away from planets or stars for full effectiveness. Close enough to a massive celestial body, more powerful functions of a metric drive become unavailable. Metric drives have three main reactionless propulsion modes: "bias" drive, "displacement" drive, and enclosed warp.
- In bias drive mode, masses of exotic matter are used to create region(s) of "antigravity" and/or increased gravity around a spacecraft, which generate a more limited amount of reactionless thrust than other methods, and enable spacecraft to hover over a planetary surface without engines.
- In displacement drive mode, small warp bubbles can be generated and magnetically coupled to the spacecraft, yielding greater reactionless thrusts capable of rapidly accelerating spacecraft to near-lightspeed when far outside of a major gravity well. Careful control of the warp bubbles also allows interstellar dust and highly blueshifted, energetic radiation streaming in toward the front of the ship to be deflected by the immense gravitational forces at the edge of a bubble.
- Finally, enclosed warp allows a large warp bubble to safely enclose the ship itself.
Despite what one might expect, enclosed warp is actually not used for the majority of interstellar travel. This is because spacetime enclosed within a warp bubble experiences the passage of time at the same rate as spacetime at the point where the warp bubble was created: a ship inside a warp bubble feels the full length of a lightspeed journey, foregoing the benefits of relativistic time dilation, which shortens the passage of time on the ship when traveling at near-lightspeed. Instead, displacement drive is the default for interstellar travel, while enclosed warp is typically limited to more situational uses.
In particular, warp bubbles are "bigger on the inside", to an extreme degree (don't quit your day job, Doctor Who): the exterior of a ship-size warp bubble is often smaller than a proton, making vehicles in enclosed warp effectively immune to conventional weapons fire and debris, or conventional detection (except by watching the sky for gravitational lensing effects). This feature of warp bubbles is actually a necessity for cost-effective warp travel, as the larger the exterior of the bubble is, the more exotic matter is required to maintain stability. One of the most common uses for enclosed-warp, then, is tactical: avoiding combat and running away from encounters. However, since metric drives are disrupted by the presence of strong gravitational interference, they also disrupt each others' operation when close enough, so that a fast enough pursuing ship can drop an enemy out of warp and into conventional combat.
The reader might be wondering: why, if the purpose is FTL travel, does it matter if time dilation is possible? Isn't the point to go faster than near-lightspeed? The answer to this is that in all my reading on how FTL travel as we envision it in sci-fi could possibly work, I've come to the conclusion that any "FTL" journey providing sci-fi-esque fast or instantaneous interstellar travel would actually need to be "half slower-than-light, half FTL", by dragging a spacetime tunnel to the destination at near-lightspeed (a wormhole, or a different kind of tunnel called a Krasnikov tube), then using the tunnel to travel back homeward at "apparent FTL". While wormholes are used for "stargates" that allow you to step through a portal and immediately come out on the other side, Krasnikov tubes behave more like the sci-fi idea of "drive-type" FTL where a spacecraft has to travel back through space at FTL speeds to get home. You can read the "Technical considerations:" and following sections to learn more in detail, but for those uninterested in deeper technical details, this should hopefully suffice to explain things.
Metric drives and the masses
Metric drives are commonplace, but not yet a standard feature on most "commuter spacecraft", "rockhoppers", or just "vans" - small interplanetary vehicles operated by middle- and lower-class peoples (the smallest typical drives cost at least as much or more than most rockhoppers). For commoners who want to make a quick jaunt to another star system in their own vehicle, typically their best bet is to rent a metric drive module for a short time, or use a jumptender ferry or the stargate highway if the destination star system is connected to these networks.
Jumptenders are one of the largest classes of spacecraft: massive, kilometers-length ships taking advantage of the biggest metric drives available that can carry entire freighters and large numbers of passengers through warp at relatively low (or at least middling) cost. They are the backbone of interstellar travel to most systems not connected by stargates.
The Stargate Highway refers to any network of interstellar wormholes. Stargates have a high setup cost but are the most efficient to operate for high volumes of interstellar traffic. In much of the known pancosmos, stargates must be located far in the outer reaches of a star system to avoid gravitational interference, so the bustling "harbor" stations and cities servicing interstellar traffic will be located in the outer system as well.
Technical considerations: "Faster than light" versus "fast travel"
While I usually refer to fast interstellar travel as "FTL" for the sake of readability, achieving FTL travel - and achieving the kind of fast interstellar travel we expect from sci-fi, that allows different star systems to live as a tightly connected society rather than islands separated by years of communications and travel delay - are actually two different but related things. (And then there is the distinction between "true FTL" and "apparent FTL". Fast interstellar travel actually involves apparent FTL, not true FTL.) True fast interstellar travel might be better described as "half STL, half FTL".
Specifically, to achieve science fictional fast interstellar travel, starships first create a spacetime tunnel and leave one end at their point of departure, then carry the other end with them on the journey. The spacetime tunnel can be a wormhole, but typical metric drives instead create a kind of tunnel called a Krasnikov tube. In either case, a spacetime tunnel not only creates a link between two points in space, but the passage of time between the "gates" of such a tunnel is linked, and this is the key to fast travel.
Mechanics of fast interstellar travel
Say a starship leaves Earth for Alpha Centauri (4 light-years away) at near lightspeed, carrying a wormhole linked to Earth, traveling for a little over 4 years. As the starship gets up to speed, time dilation kicks in, meaning the journey takes only seconds (for example) aboard ship even while stationary observers (relative to Earth, not looking through the wormhole) witness the crossing take 4 years. But - and this is crucial - time also passes at the same rate between the two gates of the wormhole. This means that when the starship arrives at Alpha Centauri, 4 years after departure when measured by observers watching the journey in normal space, not only have just seconds passed aboard the starship - but only seconds have passed at the stargate on Earth, as well, when they observe the ship's Centauri arrival through the wormhole.
While this might seem like stating the obvious to anyone who has seen a wormhole in sci-fi, what's important to understand is that any viable form of fast interstellar travel must act like a wormhole. And a wormhole is not just a short link between two otherwise-faraway points in space, it is also a link between points in time: The Alpha Centauri stargate resides 4 years in the future compared to the Earth stargate, which resides only seconds after the starship's departure. Interstellar travel with the wormhole is instantaneous because when we step through to Centauri and then back to Earth, we step back not only to the place, but to the moment we departed. Hence, two-way fast interstellar travel involves both an STL (slower-than-light, sublight) leg, as well as the "FTL" leg when we step back through the wormhole. This also means that even though, to observers outside an FTL network, the expansion of the network takes years, decades, or centuries, to observers inside the network, the speed at which new star systems become a part of "civilization" depends solely on time dilation: As long as the trailblazing starship can travel close enough to lightspeed, a star system 4000 light-years away could hypothetically become a part of your FTL network within seconds.
"FTL" network architecture considerations and dilation engineering
The biggest conceptual problem for fast interstellar travel is dealing with time paradoxes. Say, this time, that our starship specifically
- launches from Earth at 0.98x lightspeed,
- giving it a time dilation factor of about 5 (meaning onboard time is 1/5 the stationary time; see this useful table for other handy speeds vs time dilation factors),
- a stationary (relative to earth) travel time to Centauri of about T+4.1 years,
- and a dilated (onboard/wormhole perspective) travel time of about T+0.8 years.
- Because departure took place 4.1 years ago, and our starship is 4 light-years away from Earth, if they look back at Earth through normal space they see light from 4.1 - 4 = 0.1 years after their departure.
- And the wormhole leads back in time from Centauri to Earth, 4.6 - 0.8 = about 3.8 years.
This by itself does not allow information to flow from an object's future to its past and cause a paradox. If Earth sends a signal through the wormhole and asks Centauri to relay it through normal space, information will be carried from 2.3 years after departure + 4 years Centauri-Earth light travel time, arriving back on Earth at T+6.3 years. If Earth sends a signal through normal space and asks Centauri to relay back through the wormhole on reception, then the signal will arrive at Centuari 0.8 + 4 = 4.8 years after departure, and travel through the wormhole 3.8 years into the past, arriving back on Earth at T+1 year, or 0.2 years after it was sent. No backward flow of information, no time paradox.
However, the problem begins when you move a "destination" stargate back toward its "origin" counterpart (or create a second wormhole running from the destination toward the origin). Say that our starship turns around and carries the wormhole back to the halfway point between Centauri and Earth (2 light-years). Now,
- Stationary travel time is 1.5*4.1 = about 6.2 years.
- Dilated travel time is 1.2 years.
- The starship crew see light from Earth through normal space from 6.2 - 2 = 4.2 years after departure.
- The wormhole leads back in time from starship to Earth, 6.2 - 1.2 = 5 years.
Now, let's see how the signals travel.
If Earth relays a signal through the wormhole, back to itself through normalspace:
Signal leaves from 1.2 years + travels through wormhole 5 years into future + arrives on Earth 2 years later = 7.0 years, 5.8 years later than it was sent. No paradox.
If Earth relays a signal from normalspace, back to itself through the wormhole:
Signal leaves from 4.2 years + arrives at starship 2 years later - travels through wormhole 5 years into past = 1.2 years, 3 years EARLIER than it was sent. Paradox!
So there are limits to how far back you can move a "destination", or "outer" stargate back toward an "inner" stargate, which might not seem like a big deal in itself. But this also has implications for network architecture: absent some way of changing the time shift between stargates, wormhole networks cannot loop back on themselves: a faraway node from the "core" systems cannot deploy wormholes toward star systems lying too much closer to the core than itself. The degree of sensitivity that wormholes have to being shifted from "outer" back to "inner" also depends on the degree of time dilation: the faster a stargate is deployed, the less flexibility you have in moving it backward again, and since dilation is desired to expand the network quickly, most nodes in an FTL network by default have low flexibility in this regard.
This problem can be solved through dilation engineering. Using general relativistic time dilation effects - by encircling the ends of a wormhole or Krasnikov tube with immense masses to induce dilation due to gravity - the flow of time can be selectively slowed for one stargate of a wormhole, allowing the time shift between gates to be lowered arbitrarily (so that in our Centauri example, the wormhole no longer leads 3.8 years back in time from Centauri to Earth). However, since time has to be slowed at one end, this means that communications and travel between two star systems (or sections of the larger network) will also be slowed if not outright disrupted. Nevertheless, maintaining a low rate of gravitational time dilation can slowly "relax" a network over time, enabling more flexible future network structuring while maintaining consistent traffic.
What happens if a paradox is invoked?
Metric technology obeys chronology protection - in other words, wormholes and Krasnikov tubes generated by transhuman tech are incapable of actually causing a paradox. Instead, sppacetime tunnel gates that come too close to one another will repel one another, possibly via effects somewhat akin to those outlined by Matt Visser in a discussion on chronology protection.
Even if a situation that could create a paradox could be invoked regardless, Okanverse presumes a "many-worlds" style multiverse of timelines where a would-be time paradox causes a new parallel universe to be branched off to account for the alternate history.
Why spacetime tunnels instead of "drive-type", "true FTL"? Or: the significance of Krasnikov tubes
If you're aware of things like the "Alcubierre drive", you might be asking why Okanverse doesn't use them to travel faster than light. Although I don't understand the mathematics around true FTL well enough to try and write out mathematical examples (you can start with the wikipedia page on the tachyonic antitelephone if you want to read up on it yourself), there is one other big stumbling block for true FTL as I understand it. In the example of the Alcubierre drive, in order for the warp bubble to start moving faster than light, it would have to accelerate to FTL speed, and during the transition part of the bubble would necessarily still be moving STL while part of it started to go FTL, which would cause a time paradox. This sort of thing applies, as far as I understand, to any metric technology for going faster than light.
But this doesn't mean that spacetime tunnels can't fill a role akin to "drive-type" FTL, given the right assumptions. Krasnikov tubes, as well as the aforementioned non-dangerous means of chronology protection (other proposed chronology protection mechanisms cause the example wormhole to explode catastrophically, which would open up its own can of worldbuilding worms), are how Okanverse approaches this problem.
Unlike wormholes, which can be arbitrarily short - so that you don't need to cross any distance at all when stepping through the wormhole - the inside of a Krasnikov tube is as long as the "normalspace" distance between its two gates. A Krasnikov tube still bridges two points in time like a wormhole, but it must be crossed at near-lightspeed in order to reach the past without incurring additional travel time on top of this. In Okanverse, Krasnikov tubes are far cheaper than wormholes for smaller ships, while wormholes are more efficient at large scales with heavy support infrastructures, so wormholes are used for stargates while Krasnikov tubes allow ships to travel around as if they have a "drive-type" FTL system, by giving them a cheap "FTL" return leg that nevertheless requires travel using some sort of drive at near-lightspeed, making it feel like drive-type FTL as sci-fi would envision it.
How do you stop people from using spaceships as relativistic weapons?
I don't think the idea of the all-powerful relativistic weapon that can be wielded by any average joe necessarily holds as much water as some people think it does... still, there are a number of mechanisms and considerations I have thought about for answering this question. Okanverse metric drives are disrupted by other strong gravitational sources (the presence of planets or stars) and are slowed by them, additionally, so that when the warp bubble(s) of a displacement or enclosed-warp ship fizzles or collapses, it is not going fast enough to be an enormously destructive kinetic kill vehicle, and it will be slow and far enough out that an early warning and combat response is feasible. Additionally, parties with the resources to operate gravitational interferometry arrays and/or monitor the skies for gravitational lensing effects can detect "cloaked", enclosed-warp vehicles from far out. Even using reaction drives to get up to relativistic speed generally takes long enough (accelerating to lightspeed at 1 gee takes about a year, or a month at 10 gees), and creates such a highly visible infrared signature, that a target can launch a counterattack, throw up defensive debris clouds, or, in the case of smaller installations, simply shift out of the way.
Obtaining the exotic matter
Because transhuman technology is incapable of actually harnessing the titanic energies needed to warp spacetime under realistic conditions, there are mechanisms in the known pancosmos which transhuman metric drives can call upon to "cheat" the required exotic matter into their service. I've attempted a couple of different explanations for this, but have no idea how well any stack up as far as the physics goes: on one hand, metric drives might work by capturing a sub-microscopic "control wormhole" from the quantum foam, lightly inflating it with small quantities of exotic matter and loading it with electric charge to make it easier to control, and then manipulating it with powerful electromagnets. Then, one end of the wormhole is kept on the ship while the other end is extruded into the "amplifier brane", a 6-dimensional "brane" that sits alongside the known 6-dimensional hyperspace transhumans travel within. In the amplifier brane, gravitational effects are far stronger than in our world, allowing small quantities of exotic matter to manifest far greater effects; additionally, a "bubble" of the brane can be pulled closer to known hyperspace to allow its effects to manifest around a spacecraft. Alternatively, the amplifier brane could somehow provide large quantities of exotic matter on provocation, and also amplify the ship magnets' feeble control authority on the exotic matter, or some mechanisms present in the amplifier brane would translate control signals exerted on the control wormhole into manipulations of the vast quantities of exotic matter summoned into service.
REACTION DRIVES, FUSION TORCHES: THE BACKBONE OF INTERPLANETARY TRAVEL
THE POLIS: BILLIONS & BILLIONS
"Polis" is jargon for a space habitat (space station) housing many millions of people. Much of the population of known space lives in such colossal orbital cities. The most common type of polis is an air-filled, or aerated asteroid. Although transhumans do not need air to breathe, an atmosphere helps regulate and transport heat through the city to the heat rejection system, and is important for ecological and industrial processes. Large asteroids can house billions of people in spacious cities, yet all within an hour or two's train ride from each other, and in total safety from cosmic radiation.
Pictured at right: (1) Exterior of Laru, a typical "gravity balloon" class polis, located in the Abazu Free Peoples' Republic. Heavy space traffic is seen, with kilometer-size container ships and bulk carriers entering the north docking port, as well as smaller swarms of jumptrucks and commuter rockhoppers landing at other sites around the surface. Large-scale pipeworks and cable-roads are visible. The Saturn ring-shaped cooling fin, or "radiator", and sunlight focusing mirror help regulate the city's temperature and illuminate the interior by beaming light into an array of giant windows, respectively.
(2) Caverns between 0-10km below the surface. Everything here is in vacuum. Sealed and pressurized centrifuge habitats, "spindistricts", cling between two boulders, while open city sprawls across a boulder overhead, its inhabitants living in zero gravity. Massive heat pipes are visible in the distance, transporting coolant from the utility network to the radiator ring outside. At bottom, cars crawl along an inter-district cableway.
(3) View into the central cavern - the "gravity balloon". About 10km below the surface, the weight of rock under its own low gravity is sufficient to pressurize a vast sphere of air, a balloon. Countless spindistricts provide gravity here, and are open to the vast stretches of zero-gravity sky, where even more people live in free-fall cityscapes clinging to the city's cable network, along which run commuter cable cars, trains, utility pipes and other infrastructure. In the distance, the city's sun windows can be seen, shining brightly. Aircraft of varying size can also be seen buzzing about, providing a second, free-flying layer of transport infrastructure.
(4) Interior of one of the urban "spindistricts". Districts vary widcapely in size, but this one is about 1 km wide and houses around 30,000 people. The city-scape inside a spindistrict is multi-layered, with roads and walkways at different layers of the city. Hanging in the sky, the central shaft of the spindistrict contains its connections to the polis cable transport and utilities network, and an elevator / train depot processes passengers and cargo going up to and coming down from the cable cars and trains. Light aircraft and drones can be seen overhead as well.
Life in a polis
Polises are often densely populated in terms of city floor space and number of people within a certain radius of one another, yet the vastness of open air in three dimensions around you means they are also rather spacious. The sky of a polis is filled with air traffic from light vehicles, and is crisscrossed by networks of structural cables and spaceframes, transport cables, and utility pipes and wires. Cargo and passengers are shuttled along the cableways as well as by aircraft, and the central shaft of each "spindistrict", the cylinders that provide artificial gravity, contains hubs, elevators, and pipes connecting the municipal cables to the urban surface.
Spindistricts not only provide gravity (which transhumans do not strictly need) but act, due to their immense size and spin, as massive air pumps which (ideally) prevent detrimental buildups of heat in the city. Their large-scale movement of air also allows them to maneuver and move freely in the open air, which is used to align the city's spindistrict swarm into desired shapes to induce proper airflow and weather patterns. Weather in a polis is typically wet - water helps to transport nutrients more easily, and rainforest-like conditions enable the use of less soil, leading to lower mechanical strain on agri-spindistricts. This means misty mornings, frequent rainfall, and also snow - temperate conditions and frosty winters are also a common feature of polis climate.
The aerated caverns of a polis start several kilometers below the surface, because this is where the pressure of the rock pulling itself together via gravity becomes sufficient to hold an atmosphere. However, the airless caverns between this depth and the surface are not uninhabited, but themselves filled with urban development - much of it sealed and pressured, though some opt to live in a vacuum. These sectors are also home to atmosphere types that don't match the atmosphere(s) in the gravity balloon or main aerated caverns.
On the street level in a common urban spindistrict, multi-decker building complexes extend up and down, with multiple layers of walkway and road for scooters, rickshaws, and trams. Hanging cable cars and lightrail are also common features joining up different sectors of larger districts. Stores, offices, common rooms, bars, tea houses, cafeterias, hostels, etc. face out onto, and vendors are common sights at, all decks of the streets. Landing pads for light aircraft in the urban "canopy" (the roof layer) dot the landscape regularly, and most districts will have one or more heavier landing pad complexes for large trucks.
Spindistricts given over to more agricultural or ecological development vary widely in architecture; some spin slowly and generate low gravity, which also allows them to be more open to the outside air without causing wind turbulence and incurring higher energy costs to maintain spin, creating expansive vistas. Vegetation sprawls across multi-deck structures, with rain channels in the bottom layers gathering runoff from the forest layers above and into marsh sectors seeded with various waste cleaner cultures before evaporating or being piped up to the district's central shaft to be sprayed back into the atmosphere and into the polis water cycle.
Polis construction
Aerating an asteroid requires a large enough candidate. The depth at which pressurizing a thick, relatively Earth-like atmosphere becomes viable is several kilometers below the surface, so the smallest candidate bodies are about 20km wide at smallest. At about 70km wide, an asteroid is large enough to support a population of around 1 billion in pressurized air.
There are two ways overall to pressurize the interior of an asteroid:
- The "laminated cavern" approach. Existing cavern networks in the asteroid are wallpapered with nylon / aramid fiber and air is pumped in until the desired pressure is reached. This approach is generally cheaper, requiring less earth-moving equipment and careful supervision of the asteroid geology to avoid damage to the pressure containment during construction, and leaves the rest of the asteroid open to use during construction as well. It is also the most scaleable, as the gravity balloon approach cannot be used in very large asteroids.
- The "gravity balloon" approach. This takes a structurally loose "rubble pile" asteroid (the most common type) and inserts a balloon into its center, which creates a massive spherical internal cavern as it inflates. Although the balloon can be inhabited during construction in principle, the gradually shifting structure of the asteroid around the balloon makes navigating between the surface and the interior inconvenient, and potentially dangerous, as loose soil and granular rubble from the outer layers of the asteroid fall inward and the asteroid geology attempts to settle. Large quantities of earthmoving equipment and careful supervision are required to guide a gravity balloon to a finished state. Additionally, a massive ream of aramid fiber is required at the start of the project, to construct the balloon. The end result, however - a vast unified sphere of air within which an even more highly networked megacity can be built - has justified the extra cost in the eyes of many planning authorities over the millennia.
Non-standard polises
Not all megacity-class habitats are constructed inside asteroids, nor do all asteroid habitats follow the standard formulae for construction. Some polises never get open-air containment walls, and are instead assemblies of many smaller habitat sectors in vacuum, whether inside or outside of an asteroid. Numerous agglomerations of small habitats in open space exist, with thousands of sealed spindistricts and free-fall urban quarters bolted together.
The Star of Sunjata, commissioned by the Ibom Federal Republic in the 4200s AD, is an "open-sky" polis constructed without using an asteroid for pressure containment. Instead, a much more expensive carbon allotrope-reinforced, transparent flexible outer layer holds the pressure in, allowing light to penetrate from all angles. It orbits the planet Sunyani, circling a red dwarf star in the Tiramakhan nebula.
Oceanic polises have been constructed here and there across known space. Construction methods vary, but a common method involves the initial construction of a gravity balloon, followed by construction of a seal over the asteroid surface as well, then flooding the rock with water. (The seal must be capable of withstanding the vapor pressure of water at the temperature of the water's outer "surface", but this is much less challenging than the engineering of the inner atmosphere containment.) The asteroid will have already been seeded beforehand with strains of vacuum flora designed to create a waterproof seal over the asteroid rock itself, preventing the release of harmful volatiles (ammonia, methane, etc) trapped in clathrates and carbonaceous rock itself. However, large pockets of ice often exist which may cause structural problems during the water fill, and must be transported by earthmoving equipment to the surface, to be and melted down scrubbed of volatiles to contribute to the new sea. If the asteroid is beyond the resident sun's "snow line", then large sun mirrors may be constructed ahead of and behind the asteroid in its orbit to focus heat on the water and keep it liquid. Alternatively, adequate heat may be supplied by the thermal management system of a reactor.
Because the pressure inside a gravity balloon depends on the weight of the surrounding material, the pressure in the ocean falls off as one approaches the asteroid's exterior, ultimately settling at a low value slightly above the vapor pressure of water. This makes only the deep interior of the ocean really suitable for old-school biological organisms, but modern robotic organisms are capable of inhabiting all depths from atmospheric pressure to near-vacuum. An alternative method that ensures water pressure is always at least atmospheric or above is to fill the interior of an aerated asteroid with water.
CLADES
"Clade" (a group of organisms sharing a common ancestor) is Okanverse's equivalent jargon for species or "races" in other sci-fi settings. With the advent of transhuman technology, "species" was no longer necessarily an adequate descriptor for the full diversity of human beings. People began to speak of the human clade instead, the totality of beings tracing their origins to homo sapiens. Aliens, even those yet to benefit from self-modification technologies, are also typically referred to as clades rather than species.
Clades do not have inherent social significance, nor does each clade have a single, closed-off culture. The civilizations of Known Space are all mixtures of clades, human and non-human alike. Clades can even merge, especially with the digitization of consciousness and the proliferation of robotic bodies of arbitrary design. It's also worth noting that alien clades may be just as diverse as - if not more than - transhumanity in the forms they embody. In some cultures it is even popular among aliens to embody their equivalent of anthropomorphic animals, or to incorporate transhuman furry traits, or even take on popular human forms themselves. The same is also true from humans to aliens, or between one alien clade and another.
Although imprecise, clades may identified by a common archetype - a popular body plan and mental traits. This often resembles their "common ancestor" species, although in some cases clades have diverged quite far from their common ancestors. (It is even possible for the majority of a clade to have adopted an archetype resembling another clade's archetype(s) entirely.) It should be noted that "mental traits" does not mean "more or less evil, more or less warlike" and such things.
HUMAN
Transhumans, or just "humans", are digitized consciousnesses with robotic bodies, most commonly anthropomorphic animals, or unique humanoid "animal"-like forms. Many are some degree of "outwardly digital", with features such as display-screen skin or being made of swarms of ambulatory robotic jelly. There are no "baseline" humans in Okanverse; all humans are robotic, and that is simply the normal state of affairs. In the wake of the Great Abduction that brought them here, humans' adopted homeworld is the large, heavily urbanized asteroid Sylvia, in the Liruma system.
MINAYA
Minaya are eight-tentacled, squid-like aliens capable of flight. They are among the more mentally human-like of aliens among those in Known Space. In the last two centuries, advanced biotechnology and cybernetics tailored to their biology have become available, and there is a growing diversity of physical forms among them.
The name Minaya is from the Kautakry language, a common tongue among them. They have four "leg" tentacles and four "arm" tentacles, the latter of which have articulated, squishy paws at their tips spreading out into many digits. Their grey "collar" is a sonar organ (chirp!) and their moth-like "ears" are for scent, touch, and emoting, although they can perceive sound through them as well. The tip of their pointy, snout-like head contains a proboscid tongue, flanked by mantid eyes. A pair of squid-like wings runs along their sides, while their "leg" tentacles can spread into fins for maneuvering and propulsion in low gravity environments like their homeworld. Minaya have one "sex", and all have a penis with in-set testes at the bottom of their body, surrounded by their tentacles.
The Minaya homeworld is the exomoon Saban in Golden Junction, a hyperspace belt largely controlled by the Liruma Mandate. Saban is a watery terrestrial moon with a carbon biosphere and numerous archipelagos sporting high volcanic activity thanks to tidal interactions with its neighboring moons and parent planet. It is small, with only 0.4 gees of surface gravity, but boasts a thick atmosphere 3.7 times thicker than Earth's, a combination of factors which makes flight trivially easy. Much of its land surface is covered by thick, architecturally strong forests capable of growing hundreds of meters high. The rainwater-collecting structures in the forest canopy create an ecology of numerous small ponds, while various organisms - including Minaya themselves - make use of the trees' exceptional structural integrity as a base for constructing buildings and cities. An extensive ecosystem of floating plants using hydrogen gas bags is also present, which drift on the wind and in some cases are capable of active steering against the currents. Saban also sports truly levitating islands, thanks to the universe's local physics.
Sabanese civilizations developed modern, non-capitalist social forms and interplanetary travel prior to contact with humans. However, since contact with the Liruma Mandate in 5137 AD, Saban has been largely subjugated under a series of client governments and colonial lackeys of wealthy Mandate nations. Mandate violence also took on gendered form: while Minaya historically had no genders, capitalist patriarchy tended to brand them as "effete, transfeminine predator" figures on the basis of their single-sex nature and "feminine" appearance. In turn, waves of popular backlash and anti-colonial struggle also encouraged Minaya to embrace womanhood and feminine gender in opposition to Mandate gendered violence against them. The popularity of this movement was such that most Minaya today are female or feminine.
SOCIETY & GLOBAL POLITICS
POLITICAL OVERVIEW
In 5555 AD, most of Known Space is not capitalist, nor socialist, but rather practice different non-capitalist yet modern "modes of production". Okanverse's politics are informed by Marxian theory, specifically "value-form theory", which is partly a product of the Frankfurt School of "critical theory" - which seeks to critique (analyze) societies in terms of "social forms", or "categories" of relationship between people. Roughly speaking, a mode of production is a kind of social structure in value-form theory, a set of categories of relationship between people in a society (social relations) that structures how the society produces things and, in turn, structures life in that society at large. The categories of relationship in a mode of production are themselves defined by their relationships to one another - the kinds of relationship between people in capitalism, such as "capital", "value", "exchange", etc. cannot adequately describe the relationships characteristic of another mode of production, such as feudalism (Marx distinguishes, for example, between "bourgeois exchange" and pre-capitalist exchange as qualitatively different things that cannot be exactly compared) although different modes of production may share characteristics in common with one another. Societies may not always have a unified characteristic mode of production - in times of revolutionary upheaval, for instance, a shifting variety of practices may be tried out and undertaken, without necessarily settling into a stable set of categories. Communism, for its part, aims for the abolition of modes of production as such: the "stability" of a mode of production necessarily constrains the fulfillment of peoples' needs into certain forms that resist change, impeding the realization of a fully flexible, rational control of production by the people themselves.
That said, a distinguishing difference between capitalist and non-capitalist modes of production is the relevance of peoples' needs - in non-capitalist production, although it may be constrained, the goal of production is the fulfillment of needs, even if it is in large part the needs of hierarchical superiors over the needs of lower masses. In capitalist production by contrast, the needs of both the capitalist upper class and the lower class of workers are subordinated to the expansion of value - that is to say, roughly speaking, that it is commodities and money, and the ceaseless drive to grow them for the sake of continuing to grow them (the "profit motive"), that dominate and control people, rather than being a form of relationship employed by people for their own direct benefit.
Flag of the communist Zone of Peoples' Self-Government.
Characteristics of non-capitalist, non-socialist societies across known space
Unlike many space sci-fi settings, there are no space kings and queens, viceroys and god-emperors and the like; the societies of Known Space for the most part at least pretend at democracy and integration of the popular will into the political process, and practice modern forms of political organization in general. In a sense they might be compared to the socialist republics of the 20th century, except that they have settled into relatively stable "modes of production" with no greater goal, rather than being intended as a "transition" on the road to communism and the withering away of the state.
In most states of the FTU, a bureaucracy is elected by popular vote. The state often directly controls large sectors of production, issuing plans, work and production orders, production targets, and hiring and/or providing workers with housing and sustenance (potentially in the same complex as the work site / factory), plus potentially various other forms of benefit. The state may run markets itself, and/or distribute goods through a rations system(s), requests, and other benefits programs, while money in some states has been abolished (notably, in the Abazu FPR) except for FTU-issued interstate exchange rights (IsERs), and minor holdings of foreign currency, for interstate trade. (IsERs are not accepted in domestic transactions in any state, and can only be used to clear inter-state trades, according to interstate law.) Some states, like the Nyeri Republic, have not entirely abolished money but do not issue it or allow circulation of currency at the individual level - money is only handled between enterprises and the state.
The masses often produce large amounts of their own sustenance - unlike in capitalism, where the masses of people own no means of production, and must sell their ability to work in exchange for money to buy sustenance from businesses. Small-scale agriculture and production (micro-factories) are managed communally within neighborhood organizations, with the state taxing a share of food and consumer goods or revenues from sales of extra product. Landlords may also impose rent on goods production on their property, if they allow it at all.
However, there are still large portions of the populace of known space who buy most of their sustenance - many often dining out most of the time at tea houses, vendors, cafeterias, restaurants, hostels, etc; others are distributed food, prepared or not, directly through government rations and benefits, or attend state-run or communal cafeterias. Cafeterias sometimes operate on a "bring your own ingredients" basis, with commoners bringing in uncooked foods to be prepared by the resident cooks. Additionally, the government may directly control sustenance production, with (usually smaller scale, municipal-level) governments directly managing smallholder production, setting targets and mandates, etc. Some states eliminate smallholder production altogether, with individuals working at large state-owned production complexes and receiving sustenance via benefits, often with a stipend of spending money on top of this; neighborhoods are encouraged to use state facilities to produce for themselves, but not to incur too much repair cost and not so much that it interferes in state production orders.
Not only the decline of capitalism but the development of transhuman technologies and the general march of history have in various ways transformed categories of social relationship beyond the above - concepts of "labor" and the "workplace", the "family", gender, ethnicity, race, ability, political organization and law, time, ideas like "the nation", religion, forms of community and camaraderie, notions about popular media, and so on. (To be sure, ethnicity and race are not mentioned here to lay pavement for some fantasy of "white people are the oppressed ones now", but because race and modern notions of ethnicity are generated by capitalism, and in its fall we should expect to see diverging developments.)
Transformations of "family" for instance are perhaps some of the starkest: while something like the notion of "family" as it meant in the past has persisted in many places, state-distributed educational knowledge downloads, the combination of "parents'" neural templates to create a new person, and reproduction by "forking" off a copy of one's mind as a new person, means that "childhood" in the old sense is largely no longer a thing, nor "parenting".
Notable among changes in gender relations over time is the divergence of gender demographics in many places from old norms: towns, cities, regions, even entire polises in some cases - are primarily, even exclusively, populated by agender, or feminine, or masculine people, or people of other nonbinary genders, or various mixtures of such that do not adhere to "~50% man ~50% woman".
IDEOLOGICAL TENDENCIES OF NOTE
Mandate Humanism
Regardless of transhuman changes over the millennia, the notion of a unique human nature has persisted, and experienced large-scale revival in the Mandate in particular. Such strains of humanism tend to proselytize the notion that human existence is inherently flawed and filled with strife, and that such an existence is the best humans can hope for, with more left-leaning humanists of this type arguing that war and strife should be abolished for the most part, but struggle, suffering, and interpersonal strife are necessary and beneficial parts of the human experience.
THE SPIRITUAL AROMA OF THE INVERTED WORLD
The world religions of today are still somewhat recognizable in the far future, but the landscape of religion has undergone major shifts. In particular, the advent of mass immortality forced almost all religions to make major adjustments to notions about the afterlife.
BLOCS, SUPERPOWERS, STATES, ORGANIZATIONS
The largest political organizations are typically called "blocs", made of many states or other polities collaborating in some sense. Such blocs tend to be dominated by a few "superpowers", large states spanning many star systems. Among the smaller states in a bloc, some are organized into regional administrations, trade regulation or free trade zones, regional bank networks, etc. Beside this, various independent superpowers and smaller states dot the multiversal skies around the blocs. The population of known space is in the trillions, with thousands of inhabited systems and millions of habitats strewn throughout.
BLOCS: THE FREE TRADERS UNION
The FTU is a loose federation of many states, established a millennium ago by the Seven Blossoms Federal Republic, a semi-nomadic state that launched a series of trading missions to build up favorable relationships with nearby states in the early days of "intercosmic globalization". The "Blossomfleet" were the most prestigious of the early jumptenders commissioned by the state, and some of the original fleet remain in operation today, largely as tourist attractions. (In Fumi's story, Blossomfleet jumptender Asteraceae regularly services medium-traffic systems in the vicinity of Dihaba Polis, in the Rubija CEZ, including the neglected cross-brane jump route leading to Fumi's homeworld.)
The Union is the largest formal political entity of any kind in known space. Power over the FTU secretariat is contested among a number of internal alliances, and it has undergone major changes of hands and revolutionizations of structure several times in its history; for this reason, many scholars consider different "phases" of FTU leadership as defining separate political entities, much as the Ming "dynasty" in China was very much a separate and different state from the Qing "dynasty" that replaced it, for instance. The primary factions within the FTU are:
- Intercosmic Development Commission: The dominant faction, representing the interests of Nyeri and Roussilon.
- Coalition of the Malacca Charter: Although the Seven Blossoms' power has waned over the centuries, their influence remains today via the Malacca Belt Coalition, which they share chiefly with Tienhou and Caloocan.
- League of Peoples' Flourishing: The League represents the interests of arguably the most "socialist" of the FTU superpowers, Abazu and Piwra.
The Joint Trade Committee drafts and implements interstate trade policy. While it does not officially have the authority to intervene in most countries' domestic policies on trade and production, it can attempt to
The FTU recognizes several tiers of involvement in federal affairs: Full membership, partial membership, cooperative observership, and simple observership. "Cooperative observers" are those who are allowed to participate in various Union affairs and agree to honor international laws recognized by the Union but do not agree to delegate some of their sovereignty to federal authorities.
DOMINATING SUPERPOWERS OF THE FTU
Abazu Free Peoples' Republic
One of the more comfortable states to live under in known space. Some call Abazu socialist, and the state makes broad provisions for the needs and comfort of the masses, but it has no long-term millenarian goal beyond its own continuation. Abazu does not use money domestically, although the state maintains some liquid reserves for foreign trade. Much of its culture can be traced to West / Sub-Saharan African sources, with some Southeast Asian and Andean influence as well.
The masses in Abazu obtain their needs primarily through communal neighborhood-level small production or state benefits. Extra goods and services above the "ration" provided by a citizen's benefits regime and communal provisioning can be requested from the state and from neighbors and in many cases freely obtained - and in fact, it is generally seen as impolite to refuse a request for many material things, to a degree. For those not initiated into the culture, this can be a source of tension as they may unwittingly draw too deeply on peoples' good graces. It is also seen as somewhat impolite to insist on reciprocating people for gifts and favors. However, for more prized items and services, access tends to depend on connections with the right people, initiation into certain organizations, overall social status, or position in the state's prestige ranking systems that reward participation in state programs and projects, exceptional performance, and various acts of "goodwill" with metrics of "prestige" or recommendation priority to local and state planners to allow a person to request more prized things and better accommodations. Food is provided in neighborhood and state-run cafeterias and tea houses, though independent vendors also exist, partly because food service and catering can be viable ways to advance and maintain rank in the state's provisioning system. Hibiscus tea is a common offering, sweetened and chilled.
The state skims production from the communes via a shifting system of taxes and production orders, and also operates large government heavy industry complexes.
Abazu is governed by the State Secretary Committee, a body of nine officials (the number has changed over time), as well as the Standing Committee, representatives from the electoral wards who draft and pass laws. Unusual among states is the "one hand of state and the thousand hands of the people" system, whereby alternate to the
Nyeri Republic
Tienhou Federation
United Cantons of Caloocan
Seven Blossoms Federal Republic
The Seven Blossoms were a semi-nomadic state in the early centuries of "pancosmic globalization", the rapid increase in inter-cosmic communication and travel that occurred in the wake of the Seventh Molecular Assembly Revolution as metric drives (FTL / reactionless drives), high-power fusion torch-drive engines (for interplanetary travel), and space-rated hardware in general became increasingly cheap and viable to manufacture. At the time, Seven Blossoms had a significant technical edge over other major states, and the state was partly divided into two components: stationary cities and infrastructure, including the country's own shipyards; and a powerful fleet of FTL slowboats, which required months to travel between systems. Seven Blossoms sold its technical expertise in various advanced fields in exchange for various benefits - application of the client state's own expertise in various fields, access to new discoveries, rare prestige and luxury items and services, use of the client's harbors and port infrastructure, political power, etc. Other fleets were operated as "cyclers", a sort of mobile travelers' hostel that charged client states a fee to transport its cargo and passengers elsewhere, for the benefit of not having to operate their own expensive FTL infrastructure. The fleets would re-convene periodically in Republican territory to deliver the state's share of profits and gathered knowledge, to visit extended friend networks, and to refurbish parts and re-arm the vessels with equipment that couldn't be procured elsewhere. The fleets constituted administrative divisions of the Republic unto themselves, as they carried communities and production infrastructure along for the ride, for whom the riches conferred by successful contracts with client states were a significant factor in electoral support for the government at home, both due to the relatively privileged status of many and the boost to living conditions of friends and neighbors of crew.
As globalization increasingly set in, the Republican government realized that it would not be terribly long before their fleets were obsoleted by fast new jumptenders which had no reason for carrying large sections of privileged electorate across hyperspace, and consolidated resources to commission a fleet of their own jumptenders to launch delegations to neighboring states, promising favorable benefits and conditions of trade in their new organization.
Kivalliq Democratic Confederation
Garissa Union
Piwra Mutual Association
Piwra is another state sometimes described as socialist, though the government has no particular ideological aspirations in that direction. The Piwra state largely governs at a distance, and keeps hands off of local industry and agriculture. A mixture of communal and private smallholder production dominates, along with cross-neighborhood enterprises and heavy industry organizations called "syndicates" who enjoy significant power and connections with municipal and regional governments. Each citizen can request low-interest loans from the central bank for a wide variety of purposes. Much of its culture can be traced to Andean sources.
Roussilon Coalition
REGIONAL ADMINISTRATIONS AND MINOR STATES OF NOTE
Sifaks
Rubija Common Economic Zone (R-CEZ)
BLOCS: LIRUMA MANDATE
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