Privacy

Liberty

Individuality

The Enciphered Mnemonic Republic, aka the Oubliette, is famous for chocolate, wine, cryptography and memory. The reasons this one world civilization is known for the last two is because of their history and technology that supports their civilization.

It all started with an ambitious terraforming project. One insanely wealthy (or just insane) individual bought multiple millions of stored humans to terraform a world and become Royalty. Needless to say, it was morally and ethically dubious with its reliance on the enslavement, and didn’t go according to plan. The stored rebelled, killed their owner and embodied themselves, becoming citizens in their nascent republic, setting up an e-democracy called The Voice. The Voice is the Oubliette's system (in many senses of the word) of democracy. It makes political decisions and has both legal power (e.g. ruling over punishment of offenders such as early or prolonged Quiets).

Each citizen starts with a fixed amount of Time stored in a personal Watch, which they use as currency. Like currency, they can earn (or lose) more, even becoming millienniaires - people able to theoretically live a thousand years embodied as a human with the amount of Time they have stored up. Everyone, visitor or citizen, tracks their available Time through the Watch. Once their Time has been depleted, their minds are transferred into robot bodies known as Quiet, which help to build, maintain and defend the Oubliette. Their bodies are preserved by the Resurrection Men. Given it’s importance, Time is secured by the best encryption the Mnemonic Republic can devise.

The concept of the Quiet as a price for eternal existence has been questioned occasionally. Although theoretically AI could be used, the Voice (so far) has held on to the system, probably because of its important educational aspect for the citizens. As one observer noted, "Perhaps, they've got it right. A little immortality but a little death now and then makes you appreciate life a little more."

The citizens of the Oubliette are very private, employing a technology known as gevulot to shield themselves from each other. Gevulot is privacy as it is practised in the Oubliette. It involves complex cryptography and the exchange of public and private keys, to ensure that individuals only shared what information or sensory data that they wished to the exomemory. Gevulot is disabled in Agoras and everything that happens there is public. In Agoras, you have to show yourself to the world. What happens there is remembered by everyone and accessible to everyone. They are places of public discussion and democracy where you can try to influence the Voice.

Exomemory is the collective memory for inhabitants and visitors to Oubliette. It is a combination of statistical recording, public ID, public archive, library of facts, storage for memories too large for baseline neuroforms, private and public communication, a means of ‘forgetting’ by encrypting agreed memories and data away from access - even by the participants and essential part of the Voice. Accessing Exomemory involves 'blinking,’ after which the person remembers the knowledge or event.

Because of this, memory and cryptography are two the four things Oubliette is known for (the other two are wine and chocolate - and are a different story).

The Enciphered Mnemonic Republic is governed by the Voice, but ruled by a triumvirate of Cryptarchs. The Cryptarchs are the best cryptographers and analysts that the Republic can produce and as a result have root access to all the encryption systems - Time and the Exomemory. This means that they can change or delete external memories, the conditions of contracts, the Watches of citizens - everything. With all that this entails, and why the Cryptarchs watch each other closely.

The Cryptarchs are chosen by their predecessors from the most promising cryptographers, mathematicians and spies of the Oubliette. And sometimes by the Voice when the chain of of succession is broken.

It is said they time with a light hand, but since they have the ackles for the entire system and everyone’s memory outside of their own heads, who can tell?

Citizens of the Republic tend to clump together in large cities. Their technology could allow them to live independently of each other, but they like being near each other. And it affords them an avenue for creativity, which leads to Oubliette’s architecture being, in a word, eccentric. Downright whimsical. Their cities are mobile - either on rails, legs, vacuum lifting cells or antigravity. And they move so what they see changes. Each city’s path varies - some vote on a schedule, others are driven by a semi-random number generation, while others are on a path agreed on years ago. A large part of what the Quiet do is mediating and mitigating the impacts of the cities and their movements.

What’s more, the cities tend to be modular and configurable, with only a few permanent thoroughfares and structures - a neighborhood has a beautiful view of the exterior can find itself shuffled to the interior. As a result they try very hard to make their neighborhoods and buildings memorable.

Despite all this some of the inhabitants use long duration aircraft to get around the changes, docking around the edges of the cities, moving about, or mooring on collections of masts. And these become neighborhoods too.

While the common view of Oubliette is of the Noble citizens, there are many more Quiet. Like their Noble counterparts, they’re embodied, but in much less human bodies. Some are tiny, others are huge bearers of their cities (called atlases) and their spacecraft are composites of Quiet. Truthfully, they are the heart of their civilization. And while they labor, they all know that they will experience the pleasures of humanity again at some point. There are also those that prefer the life of the Quiet, earning multiple times what they need to embody as a Noble, but staying there for a need that cannot be met as a Noble. Typically, this is found among the spacecraft Quiet.

Most of the societies in the core book can be found in Oubliette, with a large number of Artisans, Fictionaries, Heterolinguists and Traders. While there aren't many Technomages, the ones that do hail from Oubliette are noteworthy. From the fan material, there are Interstellar Association for Longevity Studies and the Technomagery

Common Name: Oubliette
Emblem: A gold abstract mask
Typical Allies: Association of Stored Humans due to their common origins and the Eternal Masquerade for their similar takes on living. They’re also very fond of the League of Independent Worlds and the Tao of History. Daoine na Realta Foraois alternate between allies and aggravating rivals over their shared values.
Typical Enemies: Association of Eternal Life with what they see as a view on life and living as antagonistic to their way of life. The Cognitive Union terrifies them as a successful slave state.
Benefit: Competitive Advantage in contests related to Cryptography and an extra twist to spend on Comprehension, Intrigue, Romance or Wonder.
Core Values: Privacy and Joi de Vivre
Privacy lets Oublietters avoid observation or be disturbed by others. They use the CV to resist surveillance and observation by others.
Joi de Vivre represents the enthusiasm with which Oublietters engage life. Whether its love, an argument, an idea or friendship, the average Oublietter will pursue it with enthusiasm. They use this CV to resist people who tell them to calm down or give up.
Other Common Core Values: Anonymity, Authenticity, Beauty Carpe Diem, Celebration, Chocolate!, Creativity, Duty, Elegance, Expression, Freedom, Friendship, Humanity, Identity, Individuality, Life, Pleasure, Sancity of Mind, Secrecy, Sensation, Time is Money, Tradition, Wine, Wine, (Wo)Men and Song!

Oubliette Societies

Oubliette has a few unique societies - The Tzadakim and Resurrectionists.
The Tzaddikim (from Hebrew Tzadik, “righteous one”) are anonymous crime-fighters and investigators in the Oubliette, sometimes described as vigilantes and sometimes as police. No matter what, they do display technology higher than that of the normal Oubliette citizen.
Core Value: Guardianship to guard Oubliette from internal and external threats.
Benefit: Increase the value of one of Cognitech, Metatech, Nanotech or Stringtech above the value of the citizens for Oubliette without decreasing Import.

The Resurrectionists re employed in the Oubliette to manage citizens who have 'run out of' time. They preserve the physical body of these citizens, and transfer their minds to machines that run and protect Oubliette during an enforced period of time known as 'The Quiet'. They operate from a vast underground network of facilities that lies beneath the surface of the Oubliette.
Core Value: Smooth Passage that those coming and going from Quiet should have as easy a passage as possible.
Benefit: Competitive Advantage for Medical.

I can see them having the same issues as the Stored when it comes to being "drawn out" over technology differences. Tau once described the Stored as being like a line that goes out from the core Civilizations, where the farther along the line you are the faster your mind goes and the less you are like baseline humans, and the Idealists strike me in a similar way. Those who follow Transcendence more are likely to suffer the communication problems you discussed, but if they also are strong believers in Sovereignty they might not care to have anyone "fix" that for them.

As a civilization they would use Chronotech to improve their long-term predictions and secure their safety. It will help with predicting disasters, evaluating the outcomes of futures where they create a new mind or allow someone to immigrate into their servers, and analyzing if a given consensus would impinge on their personal freedom in some undesirable way. This makes the Assembly's democratic process more efficient and less time-consuming overall.

Chronotech would become widely spread among the Assembly. Nobody would tolerate having someone else know more about them and their actions than they do. True sovereignty would require everyone to be on the same level, so everyone would be on the same level.

Likely Chronotech Score: 5, citizens 5.

They're the eccentric individualists, both constructed and uploaded, who have moved very far away from humanity already and want to keep going.

The other part was wanting to create some more isolationist sorts like the Disciples of the Void are. It allows for some more social 'spooky action at a distance.'

At the edge of known space is a lifeless rock cut through with tunnels of wire and metal. The surface is cut through with heat sinks and hot enough to fry an egg despite its distance from the stars. Maintenance bots and defensive nanoswarms crawl through the depths. It's surrounded by defense satellites and interdiction fields, and anything that gets too close is asked to leave. Anything that refuses to listen is made to by other means. If this world's inhabitants wanted you to interrupt them, they'd come to you.

They're busy, you see, in the servers hidden deep beneath the surface. Every one of them is a digital mind of enormous complexity living in a dimension of their own design. That dimension is as much a part of them as your organs are for you. It is their vessel, their path and journey across the only frontier that ever existed: the self. They strive to transcend into the final state of their selves, their Optimal Persona where all potential is fulfilled. For this purpose they have come together as the Ideal Assembly.

Idealists are each unique in some way. One might have transformed themselves into a living song that communicates through lenses and synthesthia, or come to embody economic exchange as a simulated market whose rapid transactions form the basis of their mind. They might have honed themselves into an avatar of strategy and dwell amid an eternal battlefield that reaches out into the outside world to test itself. Each integrates their digital dimension into their identity in some exotic way, changes their form or mind into something optimized for their way of life, or some combination of both.

The Assembly's economy is an exotic variation on collectivism. They divide their world's preciously abundant processing power equally among themselves and share it only with those they care to. Each Idealist receives enough processing power to maintain themselves at cutting edge Cognitech, and to dwell in a private digital dimension of considerable complexity. When they wish to meet they will request permission to communicate, and invest a fraction of their resources into a temporary space they can share with others.

For all their individualism and strangeness these intellects are more social than outsiders might suppose. Idealists like to brainstorm new ideas in small groups, split away to take their own spin on them, and reconvene after time has passed so they can show off the results. Sometimes a transformation in coding leaves an Idealist unable to communicate with their peers, and so much of their collaborative effort as a society is in bridging the gap between wildly divergent operating standards.

Contact between the Ideal Assembly and outsiders is infrequent. They maintain a trade of software and information between themselves and other civilizations with high Cognitech, and the occasional inventor or philospher is invited to visit and share their ideas. They generally look down on cultures that reject intelligence enhancement technologies and abhor any sort of authoritarian behavior. When an Idealist wishes to visit another culture they make a copy of themselves and transmit it to their destination. Their original self freezes in place and reactivates only to merge with the copy once it returns.

Idealists can't stand the thought of someone taking anything from them or telling them what to do; only they can define how they should be. Their government is a form of direct democracy where only unopposed decisions are enforced. Consensus is only sought in matters concerning the entire Assembly such as approving immigration requests or performing changes to the root permissions of their operating system. The Assembly can spend subjective months going over simulations and fine-tuning their decision until everyone agrees to accept it.

The Assembly would have frozen into memetic stasis long ago if not for a unique aspect of their life cycle. Anyone who becomes too memetically similar to other minds is prompted to connect with them and form a group mind. This is a temporary affair meant to facilitate a more thorough cognitive alignment. The process ends with collective's component selves giving up their share of processing power and merge together into a single smaller mind. It can be refused, but minds that similar often find they have no reason to. This makes room for new Idealists and keeps the Assembly from becoming cluttered by too many virtual clones.

Common Name: Idealists
Naming Convention: Descriptive or fanciful invented names.
Typical Allies: The Idealists have few strong ties. They can get along with younger Stored through their commonalities as solid state societies with firm individualist streaks. Stardwellers would also be popular for their dedication to ideological and physical freedom. The Nanori are kin to them with their devotion to constant evolutionary improvement.
Typical Enemies: Just as they have few allies, the Idealists have few enemies. The Builders are held in disdain due to their insistence on maintaining hierarchies among themselves. The Cognitive Union is utterly reviled for taking personal freedom from its citizens. Mechanicans are dismissed as backward bigots who can't see past their own grey matter.
Benefit: The Idealists have a competitive advantage with Cognitech. They most often use this advantage for analysis and defense against Metatech conflicts.
Capabilities
Civilization: Bio —, Cog 5, Meta 4, Nano 5, String 4
Citizens: Bio —, Cog 5, Meta 3, Nano 5, String 4
Neuroform: The Ideal Assembly are dataforms. Group-minds form maybe 2% of the population but are drawn to collapse and merge over time.
Core Values: Sovereignty, Transcendence

Idealists hold personal Sovereignty to be an absolute necessity. Nobody can tell you what to do with your own self, and you cannot do anything to infringe on another person or their property without their permission unless it's to defend yourself. Sovereignty drives them to seek consensus about any changes to their world's hardware, processing capacity, or root coding. Their population growth is kept in check because every new Idealist is a little less space available for everyone else - an infringement if not agreed upon.

The Assembly was gathered to seek Transcendence. They seek to achieve their Optimal Personas through intelligence expansion and existence in digital environments they can alter to facilitate their personal journeys. This value also drives them to value philosophy as a means of brainstorming new forms of thought and being.

The HOM is a massive "Web of Worlds" — wormhole-connected planets comprised of the major societies from 21st century Old Earth, all guarded by a powerful militaristic Hegemony and governed by a coalition of megacorporations.

The Hegemony is a futuristic extension of our global culture today; politically polarized, economically complex, brainwashed by media, and most of all, ruled by money.

Core Values: Power, Self-Reliance

• Power refers to the drive for success and dominion over others. The Randian "American Dream" has been digested, regurgitated and swallowed again as the very core philosophy for most Hegemony citizens.
• Self-Reliance refers to the independence from parents/government/social programs saught by all Hegemony citizens as soon as they're old enough to join the workforce.

Lessor CVs: Hedonism, Diversity, Obedience, Capitalism

Typical Allies: Given their "primitive ways," the Old Worlders are not taken seriously by the general public of the Hegemony. But they are respected. Some Old Worlder groups are even granted representation on the HOM Senate, though they rarely attend (perhaps because the Senate is such a charade). People think of them like the Amish.

Typical HOM propaganda portrays the Daoine as tree-loving monks with gorgeous ships and a lush capital planet. They are a trusted ally that provide continuous trade and safe destinations for tourism. However, the Daoine tend to keep their advanced technological secrets to themselves and limit Hegemony visitations to strictly diplomacy, trade, or tourism.

Typical Enemies: The Hegemony of Man has a deep mistrust of outside civilizations such as the Stardwellers and any known Cargo Cults. Popular media depicts these civilizations as being comprised of "outsiders" and anarchistic barbarians who live in the outskirts of space.

The HOM military would shoot Stardweller ships out of the sky if they ever bring them into orbit around a Web World.

Common Neuroform: Some citizens wear a Neural Mesh (p.104). Fully digitized minds are unheard of.

Average Citizen Capabilities:

• Biotech 2 - Gene therapy and bio-engineered food give the average citizen prolonged life, but only the mega-rich can afford immortality. Household biosensors are the norm.
• Cognitech 3 - Many citizens can afford rêvetech service and have brain implants, giving them constant access to the Web infospheres. Lenses cost money.
• Metatech 2 - Experienced government officials can read their opponents mental and emotional states within five minutes of interaction.
• Nanotech 1 - The average citizen has no need for enhanced physical senses, but remote drones are commonplace for large industrial projects and some advanced structures are self-maintaining.
• Stringtech 3 - A normal Hegemony family may own a plasma gun for personal protection, and a wealthy family may own a basic fabricator (although large-scale commercial replication is not common). Many citizens carry some form of personal electric reserve.

Military/Civilization Capabilities:

• Biotech 2 (same as above)
• Cognitech 3 (same as above)
• Metatech 2 (same as above)
• Nanotech 2 - Soldiers are given cyberware that lets them see into the UV and infrared spectra, have perfect proprioception, etc. Elite troopers may even have dermal microbots (p. 99)
• Stringtech 4 - The Hegemony torchships can fire fission beams and capital warships are powered by tiny specks of antimatter. Planets have superconductors that emit virtually limitless electricity, and environmental strategies allow for planet-wide weather control. Wormholes are common in the Web, but very expensive to create.

Benefit: Citizens of the Hegemony must take an additional Core Value of 3 or higher.

A spacer ship that was hired to render assistance to a Nanori outpost whose star was close to going supernova. Unfortunately, the Spacers were disabled in close proximity to the supernova with the Nanori still on board. This caused them to suffer horrendous losses to the hard gammas that ripped through their bodies. With the Spacers Biotech insufficient to repair the ongoing damage, some of the Nanori felt forced to resort to the reckless use of nanophages that broke organic cells down into inorganic cells. This resulted in the loss of their organic bodies to all on board, and necessitated much reshuffling of their new fully inorganic bodies. When the dust had settled, many of the Spacers on board had not been able to adapt and had perished. Others having survived would prefer to have not survived and would end themselves rather than live on as less than human. Those that survived had to adapt to their new life.

For starters, being no longer biological, their methods of procreation had to be reworked. When Abyssals decide to procreate, they each gift a pruned Neuroform that is merged into one Neuroform that is implanted into a new body that is to be a new Abyssal. The fact that the number of parents does not have to be more than one allowed some Abyssals to prune themselves and regress back into an infantile state rather than live with the knowledge of what they once were.

With their lost humanity, so too did their goal in life, no longer could they sow the seeds of humanity far and wide, but they did not forgo the stars either. They now work at rendering assistance to any and all that may have troubles while on a voyage, and thus maintain ties with the Spacers and the other spacefaring Civilisations.

Some Abyssals have taken to using not human looking bodies, but rather becoming actual ships; some have come to consider their bodies as tools to further their goals rather than an actual part of themselves. Those that do wear clothes tend to favour utilitarian jumpsuits with pockets, patches, tether rings, microboosters and more.

Most Abyssal ships are run by one Neuroform that is built into the ship, with others to assist them in a hierarchal system to insure working status.

Common Name: Abyssals
Emblem: A bright halo with an unblinking mechanical eye looking out of it.
Typical Allies: They maintain lukewarm ties to the other Spacers, and will render assistance to them. They have no permanent allies.
Typical Enemies: They have no permanent enemies.
Benefit: Abyssals have no Biotech score, having had replaced their whole bodies with Nanotech. They have competitive advantage in Nanotech. This also means that they use Nanotech in place of Biotech for all purposes.
Capabilities:
Civilization: Bio 1, Cog 3, Meta 3, Nano 5, String 4
Citizen: Bio -, Cog 3, Meta 1, Nano 5, String 3
Common Neuroforms: Most Abyssals are Baseline Dynamic, often locked into their artificial bodies. Some however become Dataforms in order to switch bodies, considering the body as more of a tool than as a part of their own person.
Core Values: Star-Birthed and Diligence
Star-Birthed is the belief that they must aid others that travel in order to avoid others facing what they found themselves going through. Abyssals use this CV to aid others that require assistance while on a voyage, but also to avoid attempts to make them settle down.
Diligence is what kept Spacer ships functioning for so long in the depths of space, and they prize this quality above all others. This is of particular importance to the Abyssal, being something that failed them in the past. It gives a bonus to all actions performed very carefully and without haste, triple-checked and tested for certainty. This takes about twice as long as usual. Abyssals can also use this to prevent people from convincing them to do a half-assed job.

The Hou Po'e Kanaka was a Cargo Cult that derived its name from its origins as a movement to return to a mythical Hawaiian and Polynesian past, that grew beyond its original roots to include North American Anglo and South East Asian cultural elements (Philipino and Javanese in particular).They would have remained a Cargo Cult, albeit one with a Hawaiian and Polynesian theme, if not for the intervention a noble from the Tao of History several hundred years ago.

King Kamehameha the Great had been a Tao noble playing the great king and several of his descendants when the milieu passed him by, leaving him at loose ends. Like a small number of Tao in that situation, he travelled. Specifically, he joined the Patent Office as an inspector. During that time he encountered the Hou Po'e Kanaka Cargo Cult. They fascinated him immediately. Their culture was recognizably descended from his milieu and understandable by him, which also frustrated him and infuriated him, seeing the trap they were in. Still, he studied them and learned their culture and language very well. Eventually he retired entirely, saying he was considering a new role.

Then he, a lot of money and people disappeared.

Several years later, visitors reported that the Hou Po'e Kanaka were fighting amongst themselves, over new concepts and ideas and that outsiders were involved. The outsiders were Kamehameha and his followers, using the best they could afford to overturn the Hou Po'e Kanaka Cargo Cult and put in place something new.

Twenty years later, the Hou Po'e Kanaka dominated their world. For them, this means they’ve conquered all the islands they want, leaving Old Worlders to the continents, and control an equatorial subcontinent. They instituted a new form of government, an elective monarchy with a strong representational body organized along family and clan lines. In short, they bootstrapped the Hou Po'e Kanaka from a Cargo Cult to a minor civilization.

While fairly amiable and forthright in their dealings, they do have a reputation for aggression and assertiveness, using a mix of force and persuasion to control areas they desire. They also use geologic taps, nanotech and limited terraforming to form new islands. Among their notable projects: the creation of the Havaiki island group; the creation of floating islands (Kanehunamoku); the Ocean Arks (mostly self contained, solar powered ships that are easy to make).

Stereotypically, Hou Po'e Kanaka are light gold to dark brown, with brown eyes with some epicanthic fold. Hair is black to brown, with either straight or curly. They also tend to be of slightly less than average height and bulkier than the norm. The reality is that a multitude of phenotypes can be found within the phyle due to their syncretic origins. They also include humans adapted for aquatic life. Given their traditions (sailing, navigation, hula, hula chants, story telling and poetry), the following features are common among them: a natural sense of direction, internal clock, ability to drink salt water, natural sunglasses and beautiful voices.

Culturally, they have always enjoyed a number of arts, sports and games. The arts they favor: story telling, poetry, shadow puppetry, singing, dancing, drumming, guitar, slack key guitar, gamelan, woven arts, hula and hula chants. The sports that the Hou Po'e Kanaka commonly enjoy are: sailing, canoeing, fishing, hunting, archery, target shooting (typically with compressed air or low power gauss guns), "sledding" (holua), surfing, windsurfing and various martial arts (boxing mokomoko), kuntao, wrestling (hakoko), Kapu Kuialua, stick fighting (kaka la au, arnis/escrima). Traditional games are also popular, games like patterns, tops, disc bowling, to kohana (a traditional board game) and darts.

Clothing tends to be loose light, colorful and patterned, taking full advantage of advanced materials and nanotechnology. Tattoos are also common and frequently have cultural significance. Nanotech pigments are common, allowing the tattoos to be turned off, change color and even switch between patterns. Still, the old ways of tattooing are found and are popular due to their authenticity.

Their ocean ships (moku or wa'a) resemble old Polynesian catamarans, but the resemblance ends with the double hulls. They are larger and incorporate modern technology: solar cell smart sails, solar cell decks, variable smart hulls and keels, osmotic extractors and other modern conveniences and necessities. The truly authentic canoes are left to enthusiasts and hobbyists.

Hou Po'e Kanaka architecture is light and airy, resembling ancient Hawaiian buildings, with elements of the Hawaiian Renaissance. They take full advantage of modern materials and technologies to make it as durable, comfortable and ecologically sound as possible.

For all their physicality and appearance of bright colored simplicity, the Hou Po'e Kanaka are a highly advanced civilization on par with any other in the universe. They have a culture with every bit of complexity that their high cognitech, metatech and nanotech capabilities can bring. They are excellent nanotechnologists and cognitechnologists, using these tools in everyday life. Replicators are common, and computers pervade every material. Utility fogs are in commonly used for a variety of means.

They are open, welcoming and reasonably tolerant. This does not mean they are naïve or ignorant. Their security is appropriate and low key, able to be escalated as necessary.

Family ('ohana) and clan ('ohana nui) are very important to the Hou Po'e Kanaka, forming the basis of political units for election of chiefs (ali'i) to the phyle assembly and social welfare. The ali'i chose the King (ali'i nui) with a term of 15 years.

Among the major civilizations, they get along well with the Masquerade and Stardwellers. They’re a bit more ambivalent toward the Tao (and the Tao towards them) due to their role in the creation of the Hou Po'e Kanaka. Mechanicans are welcome, but frequently leave the Hou Po'e Kanaka scratching their heads. The Replicants they compete with as athletes, but leave the more extreme sports to them. Roamers are always welcome (for a number of reasons).

All of the societies from the core rulebook are found among the Hou Po'e Kanaka, though the Group Minds and Darwinians are very rare.

For someone first arriving on Gothica, it looks like a Tao of History world, with people dressed in archaic costumes, old architecture and strangeness that looks historic. On a closer look, you realize that the fashions and architecture are a mix of disparate eras ranging over several hundred years. At that point, you begin to realize Gothica is something different…

Gothica is a civilization of contradictions. The citizens are fascinated with death, but live life with zest and enjoyment. They also are broadly tolerant, welcoming and inclusive to all, but they tend to have a uniform look to their bodies. The architecture looks old, but makes use of modern construction techniques and conveniences. And those are just the easily apparent ones.
Gothica has roots in a subculture dating back to the late 20th century Europe and America music scenes and survived beyond its narrow beginnings. When the Diaspora opened the possibility of colonizing other worlds, the Goths of the day eventually organized and paid for a colonization effort that created Gothica.

Over the centuries, the Goth culture changed and adapted, especially as new technologies came on the scene. They quickly adopted genetic alterations striving for the ideal look. While there is no civilization wide agreement or enforcement of what is pretty, it has resulted in an average though – tall, lean, somewhat androgynous, pretty, pale and dark haired. The reality is more complex, with most human phenotypes represented, but they all do tend to be at least striking, if not beautiful. The infosphere, the mesh and other technologies were also adopted and used to achieve their ideal. The result is a very high tech civilization that looks lower tech than it is. The result is what is now known as Gothican. Of special note are Gothican poison gardens. They take full advantage of the genetic engineering to create beautiful and deadly plants. Entering one without a guide of some sort is strongly advised against.

Gothican architecture can be described as heavily over built, and pre-ruined. The look is distinctly Victorian to Medieval, with a dark look to it. And ruins are added, as is ‘decay.’ Given the materials they build out of, is the best way to start. The end result are very comfortable, durable, if gloomy buildings that could survive Mechanican party.

Which leads to another element of their culture – Gothicans are fascinated by death and decay. As a result they are intimately familiar with it. While this occasionally results in a gloomy one, most of them are cheerful, upbeat, life loving people – especially with each other. They are convinced life should be lived and enjoyed to its fullest because death is at the end of it and it brooks no exceptions. One aspect of this is that they tend to be pacifists. Another aspect of this is that Gothicans do defect to the Replicants on a fairly regular basis. Despite this love of life, there are those that are truly morbid, fascinated with death and very ghoulish.

Gothican clothing can be described as dark, sometimes morbid, eroticized fashion and style of dress. It has Victorian, Renaissance, Regency, Elizabethan elements. It has a profusion of black velvets, lace, fishnets and leather tinged with scarlet or purple, accessorized with tightly laced corsets, gloves, precarious stilettos and silver jewelry depicting religious, magical or occult themes (bone earrings, rosaries, pentacles, ankhs, skulls) typically made from silver. Both sexes are sexualized with their clothing, with very different looks from one sex to the other. High tech personal items tend to be implanted, or incorporated into jewelry and clothing. Their art is widespread throughout their world (some days it seems every other person is an amateur artist) and while technically able, much of it can make a viewer from another civilization uncomfortable.

Gothica makes extensive use of the technologies available in the modern age. Streetside replicators are common, and computers pervade every material. Most of the government and police have metatech training and implants, and children are often taught the benefits of cognitech methods from an early age. Over 80% of the population wear neural meshes, though not all take full advantage of them.

Gothica is a relatively free and tolerant civilization, with many modifications of the human genome and psyche available. Most of the modifications do tend to stick to the human form though. Using Nanotech to perform a scan of someone you meet is generally considered rude (in modern American society, it would be on par with staring at a woman’s breasts and crotch while you talk to her), so there’s no easy way to know whether someone’s enhanced. Gothicans tend to be polite and formal when first meeting someone.

For all their oddness, the Gothicans are good neighbors. They have a responsible government – an odd mix of meritocracy and elective nobility/monarchy. Gothicans have to sit for an exam to enter government, there the score on the exam determines the rank they enter at. After that they are elected to posts (maximum rank determined by exams) for periods of 10 years, with a maximum of 50 at a time. Anyone can sit for the exam, and all are encouraged to do it. Those that already have positions typically continue to study and sit for exams to increase their rank.

All of the societies in the core book can be found among the Gothicans, with a large number of Artisans, Group Minds and Hyperevolutes. From the fan material, there are Interstellar Association for Longevity Studies and the Technomagery, with an unusually large number of the latter found there.
Common Name: Goths
Emblem: Gold Ankh on a black background
Inspector Status: Local police
Benefit: +1 Twist per game that can be spent on the themes of Romance, Magnetism and Terror.
Core Values: Thanatopsis and Sensation

Thanatopsis is the contemplation of death. For the Gothicans, death is part of the process of life and should be contemplated, understood, accepted and even embraced. This CV can be used to resist death threats, or things that would normally terrify. It can also be used to help contemplate death more closely.

Sensation holds that the universe is a vast, fascinating place and there to be experienced. This CV means that the Gothicans will seek out enjoyable experiences and avoid boredom. It can be used to tolerate painful or unpleasant experiences. "To enjoy the flavor of life take big bites" sums up much of their belief on this.

Other common core values: Androgyny, Beauty, Carpe Diem (or Noctem), Community, Diversity, Elegance, Fashion, Ghoulishness, Grace, Hedonism, Rank Hath Its Priveleges, Spirituality, Tolerance, Thanatophilia and Worship.

Gothican Societies

Gothica has three societies unique to its civilization: Nocturnals, Vampires and Resurrectionists.
The Nocturnals are a society that works and lives at night. They have made adaptations to themselves for this.
Core Value: Nocturnalism – to live at night. Can be used to advocate for it, and as a penalty for function during the day or in bright light.
Benefit: +1 to Nanotech which can raise them above the Gothican maximum if necessary. They do not suffer Import reduction for exceeding these maximums.
The Vampires are the descendants of those who took the possibilities of genetic engineering a little too far. Vampires feed on volunteers, replicated or vat grown blood. As a group, they’ve been in a slow, but steady, population decline as they lose members to genetic resynthesis and or the Hyperevolutes.
Core Value: Vampirism – the behavior of a vampire.
Benefit: Vampires have minimum Biotech and Nanotech scores of 4, which can raise them above their civilization’s maximum if necessary. Their Biotech is considered one point higher for the purpose of resisting disease and old age. They can exceed the Gothicans' maximum Nanotech and Biotech by one without suffering Import reduction.
The Resurrectionists are possibly the strangest of the Gothican societies. Some families and individuals opt to use neural meshes and nanotech in an odd way. They use them to embrace and survive death. Each Resurrectionist has a mesh and enough nanotech in their bodies to slowly, over their lives, adapt their minds to survive the death of their bodies. In the end, as they die, the brain is encoded into mesh, and rebuilt to survive the ordeal. The body, now dead, is preserved by the sheer quantity of nanotech, revived as a sort of remote or servitor. There is a several day period while the nanotech finishes the bodily reconstruction, rewiring the brain to control the re-built body through the nanotech. For those who die of extreme old age, the process could be gradual over years. For those who die suddenly and young, the process would be an emergency, and would leave the person incapacitated for some time as they get used to their new body. Even so, the process is imperfect. The resultant person is something of a shadow of their former selves, their personality subdued and their body, in some ways, weakened.
As time passes, even this form of immortality would fade. The body would grow ancient and even the nanotech decay. And so processes would be built into the infosphere to allow the not-quite-dead to sublime their consciousness. Unlike stored, who are still human, these data-ghosts are anything but. They are the reflection of their old selves, the idea of a person made real.
Resurrectionists have been with the Gothicans for some time and are accepted members of society. The raised Resurrectionists cannot hold political office, but have several special representatives and a minister for their affairs to look after them. They also loose 2/3 of their property and wealth on death and resurrection.
Core Value: Thanatopsis see above.
Benefit: Nanotech bodies. Resurrectionists do not have a Biotech score and instead use Nanotech for it. This applies to lifespan and contests as well. Unfortunately, they are not what they once were. As a result, their Metatech score can never exceed 6 (2/3 of the Gothican maximum) and lose all ties on Metatech rolls.

The CMS, or Pretties, are a unique little civilization with an interesting take on changing behavior…

The CMS is a small civilization that grew out of a successful Old Worlder settlement of Westerfeld that collapsed. Focused on a mid-20th century American culture, it eventually grew and changed and was on its way to becoming a minor stellar civilization, when it got caught by its dependence on petroleum. Specifically, an oil eating bacteria emerged. Apparently an attempt to come up with a cheaper method of refining oil, it was dangerously flawed. Instead, it changed the chemical structure to something much more volatile - either leaving an empty container and making the area around it very dangerous, or exploding the container. No matter which option, fires usually resulted. Worse, the bacteria used the fire to spread itself. Before long, their world was wracked with fires.

Since so much of their civilization was dependent on oil (plastics, power, transport, agriculture, etc.), it was the end of their civilization. 98% of a population of billions died between the initial disaster and its aftermath.

After the collapse, long years of warfare and hardship followed as survivors squabbled over the remains. None of the old organizations survived. Cities and towns, dependent on the infrastructure of their civilization, failed as well. Still, small groups managed to survive. Most of these were outside the mainstream.

Some were survivalists awaiting the collapse of their civilization or invasion by the Transcendentals or their minions. Others were other versions of Old Worlders that had rejected the changes of their world and clung to older, more sustainable and traditional ways. Some were pragmatic scientists and leaders who used their skills to navigate the changes their world faced, or the remnants of their planetary security and defense forces.

At first, these disparate groups were separated by distance - the collapse had rendered large parts of the world marginally inhabitable (at best), creating dead zones. Invasive and bioengineered species further upset the ecology.

When civilization did rise again, it was in the form of small settlements in a few safe areas with vast spaces between them. These settlements were further separated by differences in culture (thanks to founder effects) and background. Some were very rustic and primitive, others very high tech. Some blamed mysterious enemies, or the rest of the human diaspora, or the mysterious Transcendentals, or their own civilization. Still, as they grew they came into contact (usually among the ruins of their civilization that they were looting/mining for raw materials), they discovered a common conviction: The world must not be wrecked again.
The new cities established contact and traded, usually information and things they couldn't manufacture locally. No one was interested in re-establishing the highly interdependent society they'd had previously. Lacking oil, they turned to solar, wind, OTEC, geothermal and nuclear power.

Overall, it was a time of peace and cooperation. The population was so small (and the ruins so large) that there was little competition for resources or territory. And with the collapse, war seemed a bad idea.

Still there were conflicts, and the worry that they could become wars preyed on the minds of most. The recurring worry was that the cities might grow strong enough to wage war, and that someone might re-discover, rebuild or reinvent some of the old weapons.
Almost a hundred years after the Collapse, a think tank was convened to study human conflict. They studied the more regressed Cargo Cults and Old Worlders who still fought endless bloody feuds. They studied old psychology and neurology texts, trying to find a way to end war forever.

After much research, they shied away from changing humanity too much neurologically. Instead they began to 'hack' known problems to take advantage of them. Specifically, they took advantage of the halo effect and the exposure effect. The halo effect is the tendency to think that pretty people are better than the rest of us. The exposure effect is the human tendency to be attracted to things we recognize. The texts they rediscovered showed that beautiful people were treated better than their less attractive peers and got into less trouble. This lead to the idea that life might be better and more peaceful if everyone was pretty.
So, they began designing plastic surgeries that made everyone pretty, and familiar enough that people they were attractive. Genetic alterations were considered, but since old traits (like putting on fat) had been needed in recent memory, they decided to leave that alone. To further take advantage of this, they emphasized young looks and symmetry. At this point, the think tank became The Committee for Morphological Standards, or more commonly The Pretty Committee. Over the centuries, they refined this and added pheremonal and voice effects as well. All of these developments lead to Prettytime, an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

Above is the official history. The reality is that while prettier, the Pretties did still fight and compete with one another. Since they were still human, they still fought, rebelled and sometimes hated each other.

If war was to be eliminated, while still remaining human, they needed something more drastic.

Since everyone was queuing up for the pretty surgery (who wouldn't want to be gorgeous or devilishly handsome after all?) the answer was another bit of reversible surgery.

Bubblehead surgery.

With small alterations to areas of the brain courtesy of implants, the personalities of the subjects could be changed. They could be made compliant, trusting, unaggressive, happy, sweet tempered and a bit lazy. But not unintelligent, or incapable of learning or foresight. The process also could (and frequently did) enhance the halo and exposure effect. They were all but impossible to make into soldiers (though those implants could be deactivated); bubbleheads would never go to war. Incapable of dealing with lots of children (and offered alternatives with birth control), they didn't re-create a population overburden. Plus, they were unlikely to want to change the system that made them beautiful and happy.

The Pretty Committee kept this secret, and by this point had acquired enough political power to have great influence over the various statelets. Before long, the surgery went from voluntary, to mandatory - only withheld if it might kill the subject, or as a punishment.

Still, the committee needed some people without the bubblehead effect. They had to sacrifice their own innocence and happiness to guard the world that was being created. This meant that there was a minority that could still see cold, cruel reality as it was, even if they were beautiful on the outside.

Before long, these non-bubbleheads saw themselves as … special.

These specials soon began to augment themselves, becoming "better." Wardens, rangers, firefighters and search and rescue needed to be stronger and faster. Others needed to make cold rational decisions to protect humanity. Some were the last line of defense against troublemakers and rebels, a job that required a cruel beauty commanding instant respect.

They didn't depart from mainline humanity all at once. Each generation improved the next growing stronger, faster, more durable, colder and crueler looking. They began to call themselves Special Circumstances because they handled all of the messy, unpredictable things that Pretties had difficulty with. After decades and centuries of this, they saw themselves as different from the rest of humanity, as special and with different rules.

In most of the cities, the Specials hid themselves, becoming a shadow government known through rumor. They pursue rebels, runaways, guard the borders and keep a watchful eye on humanity to prevent it from wrecking the world again.

Life Phases

Phases of life are strongly and carefully defined in Pretty culture. Outside of young children and their parents, people live segregated by age. They obey different rules, entertain themselves differently, even speak different ‘languages.’

This isn’t an accident. The government uses this to control each group by rewarding the behavior they wanted. It also made it easier to conceal the effects of the bubblehead surgery. By separating the new Pretties from their families and younger friends, they found it easier to believe that humans suddenly changed as a result of turning sixteen.

The phase of life are: Littlies, Uglies, new Pretties, middle-Pretties (Middies) and late Pretties (Crumblies)

Littlies

From birth to eleven, children live with their middle-pretty parents in the suburbs. Littlies went to school with other children their age, but with strong parental relationships. This is the only stage of life where traditional nuclear families are considered appropriate.

Parents are encouraged to only have one child per decade (to the point of encouraging abortions for multiple births). This is offered as means of controlling the birth rate. It also prevents strong sibling bonds.

Uglies

At age twelve, children leave home to live in dorms in a part of town called Uglyville. Separated from their families for the first time, they went through systematic social programming to increase the desire to become a Pretty at age sixteen.

This conditioning comes from being encouraged to call each other by ugly and insulting nicknames. The dorm uniforms are basic and deliberately unflattering. Combined with other memetic programming, a low self-image and –esteem, it is the rare Ugly that doesn’t welcome an entirely new face and body.

The dorms are under heavy surveillance using drones and other devices, but Uglies often hack the machines and rules governing their lives. Many cities allow and encourage this as a method of spotting troublesome personalities early. The most rebellious are more closely monitored even after the operation, and the most resistant to the surgery are recruited for jobs requiring aggression and independent thinking.

Uglyvilles

Uglyvilles are physically separated from the rest of their cities physically and with some carefully narrowed and monitored bandwidth. Examples of physical separation include islands, peninsulas, mountains and fullair arcologies.

New Pretties

When Uglies turn sixteen, they undergo the Pretty Process to become new Pretties. The Process is actually several operations: skin replacement, cosmetic surgery, body morphology change, dental replacement, hormonal alterations, digestive alterations, etc., etc.

And of course, bubblehead surgery. Since the human brain can rewire itself, the effects of the surgery are more pronounced in the new Pretties who had recently had the operation. To help hide the effects, the new Pretties are kept separated from other age groups in New Pretty Town. They are also plied with distractions: huge clothing allowances, fast changing fashions, sex, drinking, drugs, bungee jumping, ballooning, as well as regular fireworks displays and nightly parties. Also during this time, they are expected to complete at least some basic courses, continuing their education.

Middle Pretties

After several years the initial effects of the process begin to fade, and most become bored with the distractions of New Pretty Town. They then take a series of aptitude and interest inventories to determine what jobs they will hold as an adult and begin a course of study for that.

At this point the people who had been tricky Uglies and most resistant to the bubblehead effect are marked for jobs requiring fast reactions, independent thinking and/or aggression. These Pretties then have some of the effects of their implants dialed back, or turned off. They are then trained as wardens, Rangers, firefighters, paramedics, search and rescue, doctors, nurses and surgeons.
Once assigned jobs, Middle Pretties move out of New Pretty Town into the suburbs outside of the central city areas. At this point, they are allowed to marry, have children and live in single family houses instead of dorms. As they age, they have minor operations to change their appearance, replacing the markers for youth and beauty with those for wisdom, experience and authority.

Late Pretties

At age eighty, Pretties retire and move to assisted living estates and facilities circling the cities, nicknamed ‘Crumbleyville.’ There, they live quietly, garden and carry out other similar activities until they die.

Since their rediscovery by the greater human universe, the Pretties are under stress. Their society is engineered for stability at the expense of growth and innovation, and the sudden exposure to the wider world is troubling.

They have limited contact with the wider universe, but the pressures are there. The Roamers skip around the edges. Old Worlders attempt to contact cultural analogues on Westerfeld. Then there are the Tao … They have clamped down further, but have opened one carefully controlled access through a ‘freeport’ at New Malta. Here, the greater human universe politely queues up and gets in for whatever reason. They cannot leave New Malta and are under great scrutiny and surveillance by the CMS Special Circumstances. Unfortunately for CMS, the visitors can (and sometimes do) entirely bypass their surveillance and do what they want anyway.

As planets go, Westerfeld is very earthlike, but scarred by the industrial development and ecological collapse. Still, it is pretty. The city-states of the Pretties are widely separated, separated near sources of power and resources (typically the ruins of their old cities and industrial areas). The cities do have their own architectural styles and are as pretty as the citizenry. If they ever open up, they may have a future in tourism.

Their infosphere is very barren, restricted and stripped down compared to the universe at large. The CMS controlls access to information and communications among its citizens using servile AIs and dataghosts to monitor the infosphere as a whole and individuals in particular.

The CMS government is an authoritarian meritocracy. Its executive committee is the CMS and admission is granted by a mix of political and technical ability. Most citizens remain minors until their mid to late twenties when they began the exam process.
Militarily, the Pretties have no real forces. The wardens and rangers are urban and rural police respectively, and largely focus on search and rescue and preserving social stability. The CMS Special Circumstances are effectively a planetary security agency and city level shadow government, and like the wardens and rangers, focused on social stability. Their reach offworld is limited to purchasing wormhole access until they buy or build their own. Right now, the Pretty Committee has invested in planetary wormhole interdiction fields. They are also hiring military trainers to train up their forces for real planetary security.

On a related note, the Pretties are intensely interested in Neural Mesh technologies. While they are capable of building them, they’d overlooked them as a development. The interest stems from the idea of being able to control their population more thoroughly by using some version of the slave mesh. At this point, all they need are the experts to help them along the way.

Similarly, a not very terrifying technology they are interested in are Dermal Microbots. Since their civilization is so focused on appearance, they are going to be very popular with all segments of their society.

The Pretties are also a touchy bunch. They get along best with the Tao, but are very cautious about the Tao’s desires to gain access to their world and its historical archives. The Roamers were initially welcomed until the Pretty Committee realized the instability they could bring. Since then they’ve tried to exclude them, but that makes them a more tempting target for the Roamer youths. The Stardwellers and Mechanicans scare them badly with their inhuman appearances. The Replicants, Stored, Logicians and Union scare them even more with their apparently inhuman natures despite the protests of their representatives. The Independents are welcome, due to their appearance and the technologies they bring for sale and apparent closeness to them.

In terms of societies found among the Pretties, the Hyperevolutes, Organized Crime, Artisans and High Society can be found at this point. As contact increases, one can expect other societies to gain foot holds. They have outright banned the Group Minds and others as threats to stability.

Common Name: Pretties
Emblem: None
Benefit: One additional Twist for Romance, and another Twist for Magnetism, due to their striking good looks.
Inspector Status: Advisors only – equivalent to 20th and 21st century Interpol.
Core Values: Stability and Beauty
The Pretties value a stable world. Stability means that the Pretties abhor sudden change, especially change for changes sake. This means the CV can be used to resistance Metatech attempts to force them to change, especially without a good reason.
Beauty means they value appearance over the deeper traits. This CV can be invoked to reduce resistance to an attractive or striking person, as well as add to attempts to use their own beauty.
Other common Core Values for the Pretties include Conformity, Elegance, Hedonism, Humanity, My City, Order, Physical Perfection, Pleasure, Sensation, Stability, Tradition and The Common Good.

Metagame Notes

The Pretties are written up here as t hey appeared in the first three books of the ‘trilogy’ – a post scarcity, authoritarian dystopia. By SA standards, they’re a backwater world with a very shallow philosophy and tightly controlled. Which is where the PC’s can come in.

By the end of Specials and the beginning of Extras, the civilization(s) have undergone a renaissance – the Mind Rain its called. The bubblehead surgery is gone – its cure is widely distributed. As a result, humanity has begun to settle back into more normal patterns (at least to those of us in the early 21st century). Freedom is everywhere, with an explosion in art, science and technology as the caged human creativity is released. Morphological freedom is also on the rise with different body types (Manga heads, Surge Monkeys (going for extreme body modifications), Plain Janes (people that just want to look like people), etc.) all over the place.

If you want that civilization instead, a few changes need to be made.

• Their government becomes a strong confederation of city states, some democratic, some dictatorial, some meritocracies, some reputation based.
• They still have an eye towards preserving their world though, so they begin moving into space and building space laser launch facilities and beanstalk (its still cheaper than wormholing into orbit, which is ‘halfway to anywhere’).
• They also begin to hire the expertise of other civilizations to help ‘re-terraform’ their world and preserve it.
• They also build fullair and seagoing arcologies as well.
• The life phases described above are no longer mandated, but optional. Even so, societal inertia keeps them moving that way for some time.
• There is wider contact with the larger human universe and less negative reaction to the disparate branches of humanity.
• Darwinians, Group-Minds, Heterolinguists, Hospitalers, Hyperevolutes, Sleepers, Transcendental Worshippers, and the other societies can now be found on their world.

Their summary changes a bit though as they begin to open up the throttles on their creativity and are exposed to the cultures of the greater universe.

Common Name: Pretties

Emblem: A golden Phi on a white background.

Benefit: One additional Twist for Romance, and another Twist for Magnetism, due to their striking good looks.

Inspector Status: FBI, RCMP or Customs Inspectors.

Core Values: Beauty and Ecology

Beauty means they value appearance over the deeper traits. This CV can be invoked to reduce resistance to an attractive or striking person, as well as add to attempts to use their own beauty.

Ecology means that the interactions of living systems are complex, subtle and not tampered with needlessly. To this end, they can use the CV to resist arguments to meddle with, exploit or damage ecosystems. It can also be added to arguments to help study and preserve them.

Other common Core Values for the Pretties include Discovery, Diversity, Elegance, Experimentation, Freedom, Hedonism, Humanity, Identity, Individuality, My City, Physical Perfection, Pleasure, Sensation and The Common Good.

Originating on the world of New London, the Heliothane came from the Umbrathane civilization. Originally a fairly low tech civilization with survivalist leanings, they deliberately stayed away from some of the higher tech options that the Transcendentals gifted mankind.

The fall into a cargo cult came from diseases. They'd established and maintained a society easily equivalent to Earth before the Nanotech wars, but like Earth, they battled diseases. And just as on Earth, those diseases became resistant to their treatments. Eventually, a new a virus emerged, one that attacked the brain. It had symptoms not unlike advanced syphilis - something that stripped the victims of language and cognitive ability, leaving them alive for a time. Given its rate of spread it broke their civilization because they'd deliberately turned their backs on much of the technology that could have helped them. Only a small group that extensively used neural meshes and lenses were able to improvise a solution and that by using the meshes and lenses as a 'neural prostheses.' These at least allowed useful victims of the disease -able to function and use tools. With the collapse of much of their civilization, they had to concentrate on maintaining themselves, rebuilding the industrial base and then eliminating reservoirs of the virus. The last they accomplished by exterminating all the infected (and then all) higher primates they could not assure themselves were clear of the virus. These survivors became the Umbrathane.

Since that time, they rediscovered, repaired and recreated much of the Transcendental technology. Initially, they used it to spread through their solar system, terraforming one world and harnessing the power of their sun with solar taps. Then they moved beyond, colonizing other worlds and stars.

At this point, the factions within the Umbrathane erupted into civil war over issues of political power and doctrinal purity. Several years of fighting generated a new faction - the Heliothane. These were the engineers of the society and in charge of power generation and transmission. The war crippled their systems and ruined projects. When they realized that by controlling the power that they could control other things, and that many of their high efficiency power systems could double as weapons, it didn't take them long to defeat the Umbrathane and become the new masters of their solar system.

Since then they've quietly colonized several solar systems, emerged into the larger human community and established a reputation for successful brute force engineering techniques.

While the Heliothane were more peaceful than their predecessors, they still had the Umbrathane at their roots. This makes them an odd civilization. As a whole, they tend to be fairly quiet, technologically advanced, touchy, violent and extremely Darwinian in their outlooks. As a group they believe they should not coddle those that make bad decisions (bad decisions can include living in a disaster prone area without an evacuation plan, drug addictions, to "breathing my air" or "being in my space"). Reactions to bad decisions range from snubbing, to fights to active euthanasia. This also means there is an alarming lack of safety devices in their civilization.

With this attitude, and access to a lot of power thanks to solar taps (wormhole and physical), their cities are interesting and dangerous places. They spend power freely using antigravity to elevate structures and build floating heavy ones. Their arcitecture tends to be at a scale that makes one feel insignificant in the face of it.

They are also very averse to treating diseases with treatments the diseases can evolve immunity to before a replacement becomes available. This gives Heliothane medicine a 'rough and ready' feel to it, with a debriding and amputation common (but since limb regeneration is common -either unassisted or with medical help - this isn't a major issue).

One expression of that touchiness and violence is the way they guard their names. They are living personifications of "Your name is in the mouth of others: be sure it has teeth." If a Heliothane tells you his or her name, one can be sure that you have earned respect. Don't use it casually until invited by the Heliothane though - at best the result is painful, fatal at worst.

Heliothane government is a brutal meritocracy. If one is good at what one does, then one rises to the top of the field - or beyond. If not, a more capable counterpart or subordinate will take your place. Add in their touchy and violent nature and bad decisions by political leaders are seldom repeated.

Today they are lead by the Great Architect Goron Thote. He has held the position and title for 80 years and is actively looking to step down and retire to his hobby of the genetic recreation of Old Earth dinosaurs. Oddly, his hobby has influenced a large portion of Heliothane society and it is not unusual to see recreations, or near copies, of dinosaurs as pets, guard animals, working animals and zoo exhibits.

As a civilization they can be dealt with, usually by the diplomatically adroit, or very durable. This means that Tao and Mechanicans get along best with them, followed by Spacers and Logicians. The Darwinian, Hyperevolute, Heterolinguists, Organized Crime and Survivalist societies can be found in Heliothane controlled areas.

Common Name: Heliothanes
Emblem: A stylized hand grasping a sun.
Inspector Status: Equivalent to local law enforcement with special consulting powers due to cultural issues.
Benefit: Neural Mesh for all members of the civilization
Core Values
Survival of the Fittest: Heliothanes believe that natural selection is still a necessary force and will not coddle the weak or unfit.
Efficiency: That which is unnecessary or holds us back should be trimmed away.
Other common core values: Good breeding, Continuity, Control, Diligence, Power, Responsibility

As to building new Aia habitat, well, from what Colin has said in the past, the reason that the Stored haven't cooked up super weapons on a regular basis is that the super smart Stored run at fast time a lot. And prefer that over dragging along at regular speed to build prototypes and test out ideas based on the theories and concepts they arrived at subjective years ago.

Now, I figure the Aia have a similar problem. And for them its not just tinkering together new ideas into physical concepts, but building new computing habitat. Which is where the Rix and their rivals/allies/counterparts come in. They are trustworthy and dedicated to the goal and it takes relatively little effort on the part of the Rix.

And I'm rambling. I'll try to come back to this later.

Still, the Rix would be getting some weird and often contradictory requests. To describe the Aia as in any way unified would be like calling the entirety of the Trojan war a single unified collective.

I suspect that these guys get some resistance from the artificial consciousnesses they are trying to uplift. Bonsai Familiars chose not to join the Aia. As for Scouts…. Well, Bob (from my campaign) would fight to stay small with every ounce of his being. The idea of being big enough to be a target terrifies him. Of course, every Scout is unique, and many may be willing to accept the risks inherent with a bid for power.

These guys would make good near-villains, and a good way to bridge the gap between humanity and the Aia. Although their mere existence implies some terrifying things about what the Aia are doing.

This bit I can't quite follow:

as well as a option for maintenance and creation of new Aia habitat

What can the Rix offer the Aia for habitat that the Aia can't make themselves a million times faster? Maybe secrecy from the prying eyes of other Aia?

Humans have created their own gods since the late 21st century with the Transcendentals and the AIA. The Rix are a civilization that worships the Aia and works towards their ends and to create more.

The origins of the Rix are confused, as is the meaning of their name. There are elements of their society that echo beliefs of some of the early AI researchers that created the AIA. Whether these are recreations or actually descended from those beliefs is the province of psychohistorical researchers and historians at this point.

The Rix are a caste based, single sex society. They are (largely) parthenogenic using DNA manipulation to increase genetic variation. They also use replicators to create sperm and ova for specialized purposes.

The Rix have used this to alter themselves substantially – sometimes as much as the Stardwellers or Mechanicans. The ruling caste makes extensive use of pheremones, as well as brain alterations and extensive metatechnological studies to make themselves more convincing to their subordinates and outsiders. The thinkers have neural meshes and alterations allowing for faster thinking and enhanced modes of thought (or even parallel processing). Other specialized castes have alterations suitable for their jobs, most of them sensory, or allowing improved tool use.

As a civilization, they have replaced their blood with a fluid that does double duty as blood and a lymph system making them incredibly resistant to disease and most nanotech plagues. Their joints are incredibly efficient and they tend to be hairless, though some cultivate it as individual expression or as part of their job. They can pass for human, especially with minor disguise and if they alter their body language and typical birdlike motions in movement.

The notable exception to this are the warrior castes. Their alterations draw from genetics and cybernetics. Unlike the other Rix, their cognitive alterations are solely concerned with memory and enhanced reaction time (typically at the cost of empathy and human feeling). They also don't have hearts – they actually have turbines instead. Their bones are made of nano fiber and ceramics, which while it makes repair and healing difficult (not always an issue for a warrior caste Rix – they are ultimately considered disposable), makes them very durable. They also have alterations that make them equally comfortable in free fall as well as higher gravity (up to 2 g). A minor design quirk that autopsies cannot answer (and the Rix have not told anyone the answer to) is that nano fiber plates are visible at the soles of the feet, knee, elbow and shoulder. The advantage of this remains unknown but Mechanican engineers speculate that it is for the attachment of mission specific accessories.

Overall, their goal is to bootstrap as many Familiars (be it Servitor, Bonsai or Scout) into full blown Aia status. Their methods range from piracy and hacking to simple purchase (though the Stored stopped selling to known Rix centuries ago). They also serve as a (known) cutout for actions the Aia try to keep at a distance from themselves (and their servers), as well as a option for maintenance and creation of new Aia habitat. The last is a long term goal of the Rix and the AIA.

The Rix govern themselves through a genetic caste and dictates revealed to them by the AIA. This has lead to their actions in the attempt to form a Dyson Cloud at 3152 Volantis, the mass liberation of Familiars from the Stored and the subsequent conflict with the Stored, their loyal Familiars and Mechanican mercenaries. It has also lead to some interesting breakthroughs in Stringtech that the Aia found but would have taken to long to prove out from their viewpoints.

Like the Mechanicans, they only have one core value. Psychohistorians speculate that the Rix have only persisted as long as they have is because of Aia intervention. Without it, they feel it is likely the Rix would splinter along caste lines.

Because of their goals, the Rix seldom get along with most civilizations and its members. Their intelligence arm has agents in most places, but once revealed are rooted out with prejudice by security and counterintelligence. They frequently come into conflict with the Stored (and their daughter civilizations), the Mechanicans (several design groups are intensely interested in their warrior caste designs) and the Stardwellers (industrial espionage). They usually don't have any use for other civilizations save as a source of AIs, which can be a cause for commerce or conflict.

"Infosocialism's success is predicated on its memetic virility, not the leadership of any one nation. Communism was the first memetic power bloc on Earth, but failed because it was centuries ahead of its time."
—Kyle Porter

This was a political philosophy developed (under the name "information socialism") by the Australian academic Kyle Porter in the first half of the 21st century. Originally from the left-anarchist tradition, Porter felt that the vision of a pure anarcho-socialist society was unrealistic. Nevertheless, he observed that although modern civilization was utterly dependent on information technologies, the central notion of "intellectual property" often gave rise to significant injustice. He called for the state to seize ownership of all copyrights and patents. He believed that only the state could properly reward innovation, while still distributing the benefits of such innovation fairly to all. Infosocialists began with the premise that "information needs to be free" but redefined the nature of freedom as the nationalization of intellectual property and its distribution by the state. Thus, patents are not awarded, but research and creative endeavor is subsidized. This is less absurd when one imagines a "university" rather than "corporate" model of research and development.

Tenets of Infosocialism

The original formulation of Information Socialism argued that information has several properties that make it fundamentally different from "normal" material goods:

• it is non-tangible, usually thought of as meaning primarily digital, although Porter used the term to refer to information as being conceptual rather than physical;
• it is infinitely replicable, meaning that information can be copied any number of times without reducing its inherent use-value to the original possessor;
• and it is socially constructed, as all ideas, even new ones, are fundamentally based upon other people's ideas, which in turn are based on still other people's ideas, and so forth.

Porter then argued that, while markets for scarce physical resources can theoretically lead to optimal distribution, markets for information tend inevitably towards dysfunctional monopolies, as the nature of information makes it impossible to treat as a scarce but tradable object.

In classic infosocialism, then, the role of the state is to act as the "social monopolist," having ownership of all intellectual property, but making it freely available to all parts of the society. Porter claimed that innovation would still happen, as there would still be traditional markets for the physical goods and services derived from public intellectual property, and that a "reputation market" would emerge to promote the creation of new ideas. Infosocialism, as defined by Porter, is focused narrowly on the control of pure information, and leaves physical goods to whichever market distribution methods were preferred by society. Porter thought that a true abundance society would require the rise of nanotechnology in an already-infosocialist society, which in turn could only happen in heavily-networked advanced technology nations.

Much like communism, infosocialist doctrine failed to take hold in the developed nations of the day and instead got picked up by less developed nations, many of whom felt they were exploited by wealthier corporations locks on major genetic patents and software systems. One of the policies of inofsocialism was an end to enforcement of things like international copyright agreements and trademarks. This had a side effect of leading to a huge upsurge in piracy, especially of pharm animals, drugs, and nanoviruses.

The resulting international sanctions helped weld the nanosocialist countries into a tighter (and increasingly paranoid) block. While it was not one of the causes of the Nanotech War, it was a noteworthy contributing factor.

Even thousands of years later, infosocialism remains an important factor in post-Diaspora politics, with Unified Interstellar Socialist Alliance (UISA) on the scene, as well as infosocialist parties and sympathizers in most civilizations.

Because of these beliefs, infosocialists tend to flout patent laws and frequently come into contact (and conflict) with patent inspectors.

The UISA

While the Unified Interstellar Socialist Alliance looks like a unified ideological front to the outside world, the reality is somewhat more complicated. Unlike the ideological pacts of the past, there is no clearly dominant powerful state leading the UISA. The member nations of the UISA have little in common with each other culturally other than a political ideology. Even this memetic linkage is somewhat tenuous, as the diverse implementations of infosocialism among the Alliance members has often led to strained relations.

The UISA does not have a formal leadership or command hierarchy independent of the constituent states. The closest to an official body is the Coordinating Committee, which seeks to align the foreign and military policies of the UISA nations. Representatives are appointed by each state, and are usually active members of the national government; the Speaker of the Committee is elected annually by the representatives, and is usually a good indicator of which faction or constituent holds political sway. The Coordinating Committee does not have the power to enforce its decisions, but so far in the brief history of the UISA there has not been a coordination crisis.

Aside from the Coordinating Committee, the only other clearly-defined UISA structures are the Directorates. Each Directorate claims responsibility for a particular function or activity; participation in a Directorate is voluntary, although the primary Directorates do have representatives from each UISA nation. For the most part, Directorates are tied closely to an individual state's government, taking advantage of its resources and heavily influenced by its policies. It is not unusual for a small Directorate to only have participation from one or two UISA states; it is not unknown for certain Directorates to be kept secret from other UISA members.

Key Directorates in the UISA

Acquisitions: The Acquisitions Directorate is responsible for bringing in ideas, designs, software, and other information from outside of the UISA. This is the largest of the Directorates, and the primary target of many of the Alliance's enemies. Some Acquisitions agents specialize in entertainment content; others specialize in classified military designs. The Directorate is omnivorous and indiscriminate, consuming everything that gets sent its way. There are rumored to be tens of thousands of Acquisitions operatives , a number that's multiplied when it includes the local hackers, smugglers, and casual pirates whose efforts often end up in the hands of the UISA
A sub-department of the Directorate, Recruitment, works to expand the number of information sources for Acquisitions, whether conscious or unwitting. Recruitment suffers the highest losses of all of the operative agencies, as it cannot be passive. Recruitment agents must seek out likely candidates, thereby putting themselves at risk.

Defense: The Defense Directorate attempts to coordinate military activities among member nations. Although it is responsible for turning political goals into military strategy, it spends most of its efforts on logistics. Defense only focuses on physical military preparations, as the Intelligence Directorate (Internal) has responsibility for network and memetic defense.

Distribution: Working closely with Acquisitions, the Distribution Directorate comprises independent Directorates in each Alliance nation. Each Distribution Directorate chooses how best to make the acquired intellectual goods available to the country's citizens. Differences in distribution policies is one of the main sources of friction between UISA members.

Innovation: Although the UISA has a reputation as intellectual property thieves and scavengers, the Innovation Directorate provides substantial support for the research, invention, and development efforts inside of the Alliance. Much of the innovation has historically focused on better decryption and network intrusion tools, but this appears to be slowly changing. In 2099, the UISA released a new economic modeling application, designed using Innovation Directorate funding, that does successful demand-projection for non-market economies.

Intelligence (Internal): The Internal branch of the Intelligence Directorate also deals with threats to the UISA, but focuses on rooting out spies and defending the various information and communication networks from attack. As with External, most of the popular non-UISA representations of Internal are incorrect; Internal does not operate as a secret police force, as each Alliance nation has its own local version. Internal Intelligence works with national, regional, and local law enforcement departments to search out and eliminate threats from within. This does not mean dissenters or political activists; the Intelligence (Internal) Directorate focuses exclusively on counter-espionage and counter-terror, and has built up an impressive record of arrests. Internal Intelligence uses the most advanced technology of any of the operative Directorates.
Intelligence (External): The Intelligence Directorate is a group that coordinates the disparate intelligence and espionage resources of the various Alliance members. The agency focuses on espionage and memetic warfare. Contrary to many InVid thrillers and virtual worlds, External does not deal with acquiring intellectual property. External is concerned only with potential threats to the survival of the UISA.
Intelligence (External), conversely, tends to use whatever technology is needed to get the job done. Its agents around the world must be scrupulously careful to avoid any connections to the Alliance, and build up substantial alternative identities to mask their true activities. External Intelligence agents are considered heroes in UISA propaganda, but are never identified. It's rumored that even the Coordinating Council cannot access the identities and locations of External operatives.

Simulations, Modeling and Planning: The Simulations, Modeling and Planning Directorate has primary responsibility for Alliance-wide economic issues.

Theory and Praxis: Of all of the UISA's directorates, Theory and Praxis is perhaps least known outside of the Alliance. It is, ostensibly, the center for ongoing development of the theories of Information Socialism, and it produces an abundance of articles, manifestos, including declarations on the legitimacy of various forms of political expression, uses of new technology, desirability of foreign entertainment and research notes, some of which get re-published in the mainstream world (and generally ignored). Theory and Praxis also enforces ideological purity across the Alliance. The Directorate also serves as the UISA's secret police, monitoring dissent, making troublemakers disappear, and carrying out elaborate memetic rehabilitation on those who it deems threatening to the long-term survival of the Alliance. The power of Theory and Praxis has grown considerably in the last several years, and it has become quite influential in the Coordinating Council. A recent drop in Acquisitions activity, which some UISA opponents had claimed was the result of internal power struggles, was actually part of a careful plan Theory and Praxis devised to shift the Alliance's overall strategic position. Theory and Praxis considers itself the last line of memetic defense for the UISA.

Networks and Monocultures

The chaotic internal structure of the UISA Infosphere is entirely intentional. One of the fundamental tenets of infosocialism is that well-connected diversity is a source of strength. By limiting access to information or ideas, a nation or company acts to undercut its own long-term power. Similarly, by forcing adherence to a particular standard, an organization (whether government or commercial) runs the risk of being defeated by an attacker who knows the standard's weaknesses. In this logic, the Alliance's combination of deep connections between states, a lack of top-down hierarchy, and diverse set of methods and tools is the key to its ongoing success.

As a result, it is nearly impossible for an outside power to "decapitate" the UISA by eliminating the a key member. While the network structure of the Alliance does lead to haphazard initial responses to threats, it also allows the UISA to be highly strategically flexible, able to adapt to changing conditions in ways that ensure its continued survival.

The UISA has actively avoided settling on a single design for its weaponry, information and communication networks, even for its methods of production. This, too, is intended to keep the Alliance alive when threatened. Even the best-designed or optimally-emergent system can have weaknesses, and relying wholly or even in large part upon a single system would leave the UISA open to attacks on that weak point. By mandating system diversity, the Alliance sacrifices efficiency and convenience in pursuit of robust security.

UISA Member Civilizations and Their Politics

NuevoPaz: Multi-party Democracy. NuevoPaz is decidedly focused on internal development, going so far as to avoid participation in Alliance-wide military exercises.

Erusea: Single-party Authoritarian, local democracy. Infosocialist party came to power in free elections, but used various crises as justifications for canceling elections. Regional and local elections involve multiple candidates from state party.

Osea: Military-Authoritarian. Possibly the most brutal dictatorship in the Alliance.

haqIslam: Military-Authoritarian. The coup brought in the current regime, whose power rests on a combination of military force and broad populism. Wealthy elites were driven out by the coup, and haqIslam now has one of the highest average standards of living in the UISA.

Minerva: Military-Authoritarian. The current government was installed in a military coup. The continued strong military presence is due to the ongoing conflict with guerillas.

Donegal: Multi-party Democracy. Donegal became a nominally nanosocialist state in 2086, and the subsequent elections have largely been competitions between rival hard-line and moderate nanosocialist parties (referred to sarcastically as "Reds" and "Whites"), with a few other parties winning local seats.

Horthval: Military-Authoritarian. A military coup in brought the current regime into power. Radical and assertive, it seeks to become the leader of the UISA. It has recently butted heads with HyBrasil over Alliance military policy.

HyBrasil: Single-party Authoritarian, local "party guided" democracy. The infosocialist party came to power in a broadly popular revolution, and it remains well-supported in both rural and urban areas. The HyBrasilean party is both the most radical in its infosocialism and the most populist in its message, and has won the affection of the populace with its noisy condemnations of the other UISA countries.

Deisho: State of Emergency. The infosocialist party came to power in a free election, and was promptly set upon by rebels. Horthval and HyBrasil have provided military aid to the beleaguered regime, which promises a return to democracy once the uprising is successfully defeated.

Mordovi: Possibly the most democratic and infosocialist members of the UISA. Democratic from the beginning, it joined the UISA and has contributed ever since. It has the highest standard of living of the UISA, but is frequently criticized for not sharing its progress with other alliance members.

Maldanado Republic: Military-Authoritarian. One of the oldest members of the UISA, it was originally a democratically elected government, but the military staged a coup over a lack of ideological purity by the government. Today, it suffers from an internal rebellion and can barely contribute to the alliance.

Economics and Politics

"Information is power, in the most fundamental sense. It flows, yet it must have a medium through which to flow or it dissipates. It makes all action possible, yet it cannot do anything on its own. Nothing is possible without information. Those who forget that information and power are one and the same do so at their own peril."
–Kyle Porter, What Is To Be Done? (v2.0)

Although most UISA opponents consider the Alliance to be a monolithic ideological whole, there is actually considerable diversity within the coalition regarding politics, economics, and the implementation of infosocialism. Member nations came to Infosocialism through a variety of means – from coups to popular election. Infosocialism is a populist movement, and pundits frequently neglect to mention its continuing popularity in most of the UISA states.

Economically, the Alliance members are all socialist in the broad sense, but with varying types of internal markets. In most UISA states, services such as power and web connections are state-funded, while agriculture and consumer products tend to be more market-driven. Horthval, HyBrasil and Minerva are aggressively statist, down to giving production quotas to individual farmers and small manufacturers. Donegal and NuevoPaz fall closer to the classic infosocialist model, only having state control of intellectual property distribution and basic services, while leaving most production decisions to a lively internal market. The development of demand-prediction software has helped to better synchronize Alliance-wide supply and demand, and most member countries are able to manage their economies without causing the economic meltdowns that socialist nations in the 20th century often faced.

There is also considerable diversity in the manner in which technology is distributed by the governments. Despite being the cornerstone of the infosocialism concept, the free availability of intellectual property has proven to be a controversial topic even within the UISA. In some countries, all citizens have full access to the UISA Library, from popular entertainment to weapon design; in others, citizen access to the Library is restricted, limited only to pirated Bollywood musicals and escapist InVids. The divide between free-distribution and controlled-distribution states falls along the same axis as the split between democratic and authoritarian UISA nations; in short, it comes down to whether or not the government trusts its people.

Unsurprisingly, the UISA is highly factionalized. Since its inception, it has seen the loss of founding members in a interstellar war, continued brushfire wars along its borders, and relentless propaganda. Intelligence and covert operation attacks against its survival by leading nations. How to respond is the crux of intense ongoing debate within the Alliance.

While the inter-member conflicts are highly visible, and many have deep historical roots, the cross-civilizational factional conflicts have a greater influence on the ability of the UISA to respond to crises. Each faction is able to bring supporters into the streets to rally for or against government policies, and each claims a seat of official power that prevents the others from moving decisively against it. Factional rivalries can be brutal; there have been hundreds (if not thousands) of assassinations of factional leaders and notable activists since the formation of the Alliance. In some cases, the factions themselves are split between those who favor central control and those who wish to expand citizen participation in the evolution of the UISA.

Known factions

Hard-liners: Cooperation with the Corporatist world is inevitably a mistake in their view. While many tend towards authoritarianism, a substantial minority believe that the only successful revolutions will come with full citizen support. Ideologues can be found in much of the national leadership, and the Directorate of Theory and Praxis is an important center of power.
Philosophers: A younger generation of infosocialists see the ideology as an evolutionary process, not a rigid dogma. They are dedicated to the philosophy, but want to make it work in a changing world. While they disdain compromise for short term gain, they are not as stubborn as the hard-liners. In factional conflicts they tend to be balancers and subtle politicians. Their primary approach is to look at "big picture." The are a small but influential faction, primarily found in the Innovation Directorate.
Pragmatists: The so-called Pragmatist faction is willing to do whatever is needed to keep the UISA going, even if that means sometimes compromising on principle. Many of the side-deals cut by the UISA (for wormhole connections, or 3He, inversion beams, or medical supplies) were carried out by Pragmatists. They are found throughout the Directorate of Intelligence (External), but are also visible in Innovation and in Acquisitions. Most tend towards a democratic approach, especially those in Innovation, but a strong minority are happily authoritarian as needed.
Revolutionaries: The Revolutionaries are hard-liners; unlike the older faction, they tend to be aggressive about the need to export infosocialism to the Corporatist world.. Most Revolutionaries are younger citizens of the UISA. The new generation claims to have learned the lessons of the past, but still brooks no dissent, especially any that suggests that the UISA will not eventually lead a interstellar revolution. They are often found in Acquisitions, especially in recruiting, but are also common in Theory & Praxis.

Military Forces

As a result of its commitment to systemic diversity, the UISA's military is quite haphazard. Member nations use a wide range of equipment, much of which is derived from the weaponry of the other civilizations, usually with local variations. This chaotic situation is made manageable by the widespread deployment of replicators, allowing a single supply unit to provide ammunition and spare parts for every weapon and piece of equipment.

At their worst, however, UISA military forces are more delicate and require substantially more maintenance than their counterparts in other militaries. While replicators allow for the supply of diverse units, it often takes upwards of several hours to produce the correct pieces of equipment, making "on-the-fly" re-supply a dangerously slow process. And when Great Power opponents encounter UISA weapons based on their own designs, they're often able to attack based on their classified knowledge of system weaknesses.

Technology

The UISA Infosphere

In comparison to the infosphere as seen in developed civilizations, the UISA Infosphere is wildly outdated. Little of it is fully-immersive, and vast sections still rely on ancient protocols. As with many of the UISA-wide systems, however, the UISA Infosphere is designed to value robust flexibility over elegance and control. The network has proven to be remarkably resilient, staying available to most of the Alliance even in the face of massive infrastructure attacks.

Once completed, the UISA Infosphere was connected directly to the interstellar one. The Alliance's opponents quickly cut connections to the UISA, however, trying to prevent both Alliance piracy of material on the and mainstream access to already pirated material. When this happened, hackers on both sides worked to re-establish links. This cat-and-mouse game continues to the present, often with the unwitting cooperation of transition nations.

The ability of the UISA Infosphere to remain usable even when routed across networks of dubious reliability affirms the decision of the designers to focus on robust simplicity. Complexity was only added when needed; the UISA Infosphere was originally planned to be open to the world, but later updates cordoned off a section limited to internal communication. Another addition allowed individual national governments within the UISA to cordon off certain sections, restricting citizen access to the material.

With the connections to the outside, of course, comes regular attacks by opposing governments and hacktivists. An Alliance report once claimed that the UISA Infosphere has been subject to a greater volume of hostile activity than any other network every created, and few disagree. In the first several centuries of the UISA Infosphere's existence, it was regularly brought down by hackers. Over time, the UISA Web's defenses grew stronger, and there hasn't been a successful denial-of-service attack on the network in decades.

Not all of the attacks come from outside, another factor in the UISA Infosphere's current stability. A substantial number came from within the UISA – not from spies or dissidents, but from curious (and sometimes vaguely malicious) young adults, seeking to explore the limits and weaknesses of the UISA Infosphere. The network's defenders quickly learned to counter all manner of threat, and claim, with some justification, that the UISA Infosphere may be the most secure open network in the world.

At present, the UISA Infosphere provides access to a broad range of intellectual property. Some of it is original to the UISA, some is public domain or open source, although much of the content, from entertainment to genemod designs and software, is pirated. Some of the material has been hacked to take out content-rights management routines, but a surprising amount has not. The Directorate of Acquisitions often simply posts new content directly to the web; many unwitting would-be-pirates have been caught using downloaded material still fully protected by CRM code.

Replicators

As throughout the rest of the universe, replicators, minifacs and 3D printers are wildly popular in the UISA. They are still relatively few in number, however, so most are controlled by national governments, which tend to give the military priority. Numbers are steadily increasing, and UISA leaders have realized the political value of their greater distribution. Unlike in much of the developing world, the cost of product design licenses will not deter the rapid growth of minifac use in the UISA.

Power Sources

Authoritarian UISA nations tend to rely on cheap to implement, highly efficient large-scale installations such as 3He Fusion plants, satellite power stations, and multi-acre (or mile) solar arrays.

The power networks being built in low-authority UISA states are heavily distributed, with many small plants and very few major installations. As with other elements of the Alliance infrastructure, diversity and redundancy are seen as key features. Solar arrays and fusion plants have been supplemented, even replaced, by so-called "micro-generation" systems, which often use older but still useful technologies: vehicle-sized fuel cells powering buildings, gas turbine engines powering neighborhoods, high-efficiency solar cells used as building exterior material and more recently, small inversion powered power supplies. Member states are also taking advantage of regional resources where possible, such as tapping geothermal energy or tidal power.

Common Name: Infosocialists

Epithets: Commies

Emblem: Hammer and helix.

Inspector Status: None. Patent Office has no official relations with the UISA and is considered an “enemy of the state” by most of its member civilizations.

Benefit: All members of the UISA are able to access items and services that individuals normally could not. For purposes of these rules, they can buy moderately expensive items without concern, or highly expensive ones by getting the appropriate permissions.

Core Value: Infosocialism and Self-reliance

Infosocialism – that the market distribution of information and its products tends towards dysfunctional monopoly and therefore states should act to distribute information, making it freely available, while subsidizing research and innovation.

Self-Reliance drives the moral center of the Infosocialists. It’s what makes them eschew the tech they'd have to buy from outside powers, and what makes them turn down offers of alliance from other civilizations. It generally makes life harder for the Infosocialists, but to them it means that they’ll sink or swim on their own merit, not because of others. This CV also led to the UISA’s non-standard infosphere which poses a problem for both ordinary travelers from other civilizations and Independents away from home.

Metagame notes

I'm not sure about the fit of the Infosocialists in the setting, but I figure some sort of opposition to the T's and the Patent Office should exist. Anyway, they're intended to provide 'repeat offenders' for a game, and more credible than the New Republic and with more oomph than the Darwinists or a Nihilist society would.

Any comments and suggestions on improving them would be appreciated.