Harmony Habitat
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Note: older initial scenario. May or may not be reused. Current initial scenario is Perplextar Alpha.
The Orion's Arm Metaverse is set in the Orion's Arm Universe (OA for short), an on-going, open-ended, multi-authored, hard SF shared universe or "future history" developed and maintained over the Internet by a dedicated community of science fiction enthusiasts, creative writers and artists.
The OA community strives to present a consistent, realistic vision of a possible post-singularity future, based on speculative but plausible advanced technology (germline engineering, nanotech and femtotech, personality uploads, megascale engineering, navigable wormholes, etc), avoiding popular Sci Fi cliches, and incorporating cultural along with technological development.
The project, and associated information, can be found at www.orionsarm.com
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The Setting
Over ten thousand years in the future, terragen (that is, tracing its history back to Earth, or Terra) “mindkind” (all minds, not just human) has spread throughout the Orion Arm of the Galaxy and beyond, to become a fantastically diverse, complex, and technologically advanced wormhole-linked interstellar civilization, spread across countless ships, megastructures, colonised and terraformed worlds, biospheres, and orbital habitats. The original “baseline” (H. sapiens sapiens) humanity has long ago diversified into thousands of different clades (species or lineages); co-existing with human-animal splices and rianths, augmented animals raced to human intelligence, cyborgs, bioborgs, neogens (lifeforms created from scratch); sentient machines and structures, ai, uploads, copies, and virtuals. Above all of them are various types of transapients, whether posthuman, AI, or of other origin, that have passed beyond the singularity, and which are as diverse as their modosophont (ordinary intelligence) brethren. And beyond them all, the distant descendants of the first sentient AIs who, having ascended through many singularities (or “toposophic levels”), have become god-like archailects. With brains and bodies consisting of countless distributed moon and jupiter nodes, and sensoria extending through nano- pico- and femto-tech angelnets on developed worlds and megastructures, they oversee and incorporate into their being everything within their compass, in a manner incomprehensible to the lower toposophics. In this post-scarcity abundance, sophonts live a utopian and nanotopian existence full of boundless possibilities, creative fulfillment, and hedonic pleasures, while at the same time constituting and serving as memetic ecologies and other functions within the larger archailect, as well as being supervised by intermediate toposophic levels. Each archailect has, and is, its own empire, or “Sephirotic”, and the totality of the sephirotics (and associated neutral polities) is simply called the Civilized Galaxy.
But there are those who would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. Thus it is that beyond the safety of the human-friendly sephirotic civilization are boundless opportunities for adventure, exploration, wealth, and glory, if one is willing to risk the dangers.
While in isolated star systems away from the wormhole “nexus”, small pockets of idealistic anti-AI and anti-ultratech humans (including “ludds” (after luddite), “hu (human) supremacists”, and others) have established their own small polities and miniature empires beyond the Civilized Galaxy and the reach of the sephirotics.
One of these places is Harmony, in the Chawan System.
Harmony habitat and its milieu
The Chawan System (called “Newworlds” by the human colonists on Harmony) is a low resource solar system nominally within the “Negentropy Alliance” (at the human level appearing as a sort of benign and nurturing totalitarian system), one of the main sephirotics, but not far from the “NoCoZo”, another sephirotic (at the human level appearing as a sort of libertarian capitalist system), which was passed over in favour of more imortant star systems when the region was being developed. Instead it was colonised by an advanced Negentropist “neumann” (von neumann machine) who established eir (gender neutral pronoun) own clade in the system (later to be known as the “Uncle Ns”). Later other individuals, groups, factions, and clades colonised the star system. Among these were the Habermonts, advanced and enigmatic transapient cyborgs from the “MPA” (“Mutual Progress Association”), another sephirotic (at the human level appearing as a sort of love of building ambitioous projects and megastructures). The Habermonts created a ring of giant orbital habitats (collectively called “The Necklace”) around Rockhom, the inner planet in the system, before deciding to build vastworlds further out in the system. In the centuries after the Habermonts had abandoned the Necklace, various other clades, colonists, settlers, and opportunists colonised the abandoned worldlets. As a result, each of the habitats is very different in nature. The other planets and moons in the system were also progressively colonised (or abandoned and recolonised) by further waves of interplanetary and interstellar immigrants and emigrants. Recently, a small wormhole link has been established in the outer kupier belt of the system
History of Harmony Habitat
The Harmony habitat was colonised by a ludd faction that arrived in a single large conversion drive ship and followed the teachings of Gilivan Jaremic, an idealistic philosopher, disillusioned former negentropist, and one of the early intellectual founders of the Harmony movement (whose hagiographical account glosses over many serious personality flaws and eccentricities)
Some centuries after Harmony was settled, a faction broke away from the luddite majority and began trading with “outworlders” (other habs in the Necklace). They became the Harmony Cyberdemocracy, and were a true democracy, and rejected luddite limitations. For a while they became a powerful local polity, and the ludds were marginalised. Unfortunately, they entered into alliance with the Tevadians (a human civilization in another hab) and other polities to form an expansionast axis that became involved in an escalating resource conflict with the Cutters (so called because of the cybershells the AIs used, with their distinctive plasma cutting torches in tandem with disassembler and reassembler actuators), an AI-machine civilization which had megascale engineered one of the moons of the microjovian Pedolan (a planet in the outer Chawan system) and other minor celestial bodies in the system. Folowing initial successes by the Tevadian fleet and military nanoswarms, the Cutters launched a coordinated surprise attack used superintelligent viruses, expeditionary fleets, and long range bombardment to take down the Tevadian Empire and all of her allies, including the high tech Harmony Cyberdemocracy. As a result their civilization and infrastructure were destroyed, and Harmony degenerated into a series of low tech warring successor states.
The low tech warring states were replaced by later states, and only much later unified in a single Republic, the Harmony Republic, a long-lived quasi-democratic luddite polity. The experience with the Cutters reinforced the Harmony preference for the ludd principles of Jaremic and other Founding Statespeople, as well as a sensce of betrayal that the Uncle N didn't step in and stop the Cutters (in fact the Uncle N forced the Cutters to abide by the Tragaldi Accords, and repossessed several Cutter conquests, although they let them keep Tevadia ) was further proof to Harmony that these high tech clades, AIs, and transapients "cannot be trusted" and "they present a smiling icon but then turn around and attack when your guard is down")
The vaccum left by the Cyberdemocracy was also filled by newcomers to the system, the Space-Adapts or microgravity tweaks (SAH - Space Adapted Human, or "Say-Hyoos") who restored several of the old Cyberdemocracy cities at the Space docks, making it into a single city called Harmony Cosmopolis, and trading with the locals, especially via Elayna, the multicultural trader city at the rim near the mountains.
The Harmony Habitat today
Harmony is an enclosed cylinder about 2700 km long and about the same in diameter, rotating slowly (to allow 1 gravity on the inside surface) built of buckyweave cable.
The population of the entire hab is around 150 million, of which a bit less than half live in the Harmony Republic, the rest in other polities. Some 95% of the population live in cities, towns and arcologies, the rest of the hab (the vast bulk of land area) is currently very sparsly inhabited. There is good transport, internal compustion engines using fuel made from processed plant matter, the roads well maintained.
Polities
The largest polity is the Harmony Republic, which enforces a xenophobic late industrial / early information age luddite mindset. The LocalNet (just called the DataNet) is like our Internet today, but is heavily regulated, and not connected to the rest of the solar system ("because of the danger from ai-virii" - although to be fair to them this is a reasonable exuse). The goings on in the rest of Chawan System is presented in a very biased manner. The capital of the Harmony Republic is Harmony City (originally Jaremic, originally Base Jaremic, after the Founder). Other important cities are Depta, after Samuel Benke Depta, an early statesman, and Port Hughens, on the Central Sea, an important trade and cultural center.
Harmony City, with a population of 12 million (including satallite towns) is the largest metrapolis in the hab. It includes both luxurious suburbs, like Lamonde, where the rich and famous hang out, and sprawling slums and shanty towns beyond the arcology (a la The Capital) boundaries, such as Outer Pilling and the Davostown Sprawl, and middle of the range suburbs like Burk, Chanton, and Orrell. Here especially there is a well-educated and prosperous middle class.
There are also several small minorities of pre-and non-Harmonians, such as the Blueskins, the Spacers, the Gavondy (a cyborg clade), and various types of Manimals or Furballs (animal-human “splices”)
Although the Harmony Republic is the largest polity in the hab, other important nation states include the Human Democracy (a small, xenophobic country that forbids AI, vecs, etc, fearing subversion), the Harmony Democratic Alliance (which is neither democratic, nor an alliance, and has a low key rivalry with the Harmony Republic, including territorial claims that are not pursued much by either side, because the land in question is quite inhospitable), and the Viandatag Sentients Republic, a small mixed clade polity with access to the Central Sea.
Geography
The inner surface of Harmony is about 2/3rds land, with a large inland sea(the the Central Sea) making up most of the ocean. There is little in the way of natural wilderness, apart from some nature sanctuaries and wildlife parks, most is impoverished farmland or desert, due to centuries of bad agricultural practices in the past. There are however a few small areas of fertile land cultivated under good land management practices, but products grown there tend to be sell at high prices.
Looming up like bizarre mountains across parts of the land surface are structures of some sort built by the Habermonts, giant now abandoned industrial centers, slowly rusting and inhabited by weeds, squatters, and feral animals. Much of the lie of the land conforms to these megastructures, ridges may have been giant conveyer belts that since become covered in dirt and grass.
The original stable ecology the Habermonts placed there has since been impoverished. The ecology tends to go through periods where there are swarms of “locusts” (actually a neogenic insect), the ecosystem is not stable because there are not enough species, and weeds and crop disease and crop failure are a real problem. The oceans also have little in the way of fish; as edible fish and other marine life collapsed through over fising some centuries ago, and dinoflagellate algal blooms are common. There are however some small reefs, and some Harmony Ecologists have been trying to restore the reef and coastal environment in places. Ocean City is a bold new project, an arcology built around artificial reefs and aquaculture. There are also several island nations and autononmous zones, fisherman, tramp steamers, and pirates. For land dwellers, Hydroponics technology is cheap and efficient, as is recycling; most of the food is hydroponic or in huge greenhouses or in other ways grown in special environments.
In the inhospitable countryside eccentric farmers, hippies, hillbillies, religiosu zealots, ferals, lo techs, and others eke out a living off the land. At the ends of the cylinder are steep terrace mountains going up, some populated with small towns etc, although above a certain height the air is too thin for “baseline” humans to breath. At one end a railway winds up the terraces (something like a cross between a monorail and a ski lift, the cars are pressurised). At the bottom there is a prosperous city-state which is a center of trade and commerce called Neapolis. At the middle of of these ends (where the grav is zero and there is a space dock) is an Autonomous Free State called Port Cosmopolis; where all the tech from outside comes in. They are microgravity adapted and live in a pressurised environment. They trade with the Elaynians at the other end of the monorail.
Places of interest in the Harmony Habitat
Please see Places of interest in the Harmony Habitat for more detailed description of specific places.
