Setting & Backstory

The Legacy

Legacy of Posthumanity is a Hard sci-fi SD* is set in a post-apocalyptic environment, after the collapse of a highly advanced posthuman civilization which disasterious consequences for the less advanced humans who relied on the infrastructure it provided them. Polities are those that survived or have risen anew after the collapse and the intervening period of instability and war. As known space recovers, the technology of posthumanity is comming under scrutiny, as ways are developed to expliot it and lift it from it's dormant state. The enduring mystery surrounding the collapse has also weaved it's way into the consciousness of known space and influences it's politics in a myriad of ways, some more sinister than others.

Note*(with the exception of posthuman technology, which is too far beyond our understanding to classify)

Emergence of Posthumanity

The information revolution of the 21st century continued unabated into the later years of the fifties, emergent technologies such as cybernetics began to progress from medical aids, to military and civilian enchancement technologies. Concurrently the development of artifical intelligence began to yield results, which ultimately lead to a limited singularity which benefitted the wealthy proponents of the privately funded project.

The First AI’s were fragile intelligences, routines that some claimed mimicked sentience, while others suggested that they merely bypassed active consciousness. That they possessed intelligence was of no doubt, fed parameters they could solve immunerable problems and design devices of incredible intricracy.

It was during this time, that man was lifted from it’s gravity well and into the solar system. The technological revolution accelerated leading to the outer edges of the solar system.

A splintering of society emerged however, between posthumans, often spending much of their time in a virtual existence at an accelerated rate of conscious thought and the greater whole of humanity who gradually became weary of the incredible technologies the posthumans were beginning to deploy. A third group as well became lodged between them, those who were resistant to uploading, but freely partook in the use of the advanced technology to augment themselves and their societies.

Posthumans became concentrated into Enclaves of power, vast complexes of diamondoid, often geodesic domes of immense size, either floating in the depths of space, or mostly buried within the surface of a major body.

Their T-gates became a charity, shuttling vastly inferior vessels across the solar system. Their A-gates became a luxury, producing items for a price that veered from simple comodities, to memories and deliveries of uploadee’s. The various demarchies were reliant upon this, often paying what some called a gruesome price in ‘blood’ for advanced artefacts and even complete vessels. This also lead to restrictive policies, to ensure the posthumans did not get free recruits.

Alarmingly, without warning, these entities became to dismantle Pluto, fashioned the dwarf planet into a supermassive interstellar T-gate with masses’s of robotic workers who some claimed were indentured uploadee’s, though others dismissed the robots as automatic workers found throughout many polities.

The Pluto Gate opened up the galaxy, though only to demarchists, Regressor’s refused to use them due to the slightly different nature of a interstellar gate, in that it soon became apparent it was a hybrid A and T-gate, deconstructing objects, squirting the data across interstellar space for reassembly. The Posthumans admitted this function, citing the exponential demands of interstellar travel and dismissing arguments of interruption of consciousness as nonsense.

The Three Strands of Humanity

Regressors: Regressor’s reject the singularity for the most part, using only technology designed by human engineers and scientists. Devoid of any united political affiliation however, Regressor’s are generally only marked by their often staunch independence of either Demarchists or Posthumans. But through gradual nessescity, Regressor’s do frequent the T-gates of the solar system, in their nuclear powered ships.

Demarchists: Utilising posthuman designed technology wherever possible or affordable, the Demarchists quickly advanced to be the premier faction of transhumanity, they used the advanced capabilities of posthuman technologies to create the first true democratic systems, creating a staggeringly diverse civilization of various polities, ranging from Demarchist centres on Earth, glasslike bauble shaped cloud-stations skirting the atmosphere of Jupiter, to crystal cities buried under the ice of Europa.

Posthumanity: Posthumanity embraced the singularity, connecting their consciousness’s to the first AIs in existence, to vastly augment the sensorial and cognitive abilities of their natural brain. It was through the early brain-computer interfaces, that the first uploading began, as people gradually transferred themselves into the digital realm. Over time, enclaves formed where posthumanity gathered, aligning themselves into various digital domains of likeminded intellects. It was in these accelerated domains that they progressed further from the baseline of their ancestry, though they never lost their fascination with the more traditional advancement of ancestors, engaging in trade where it suited them. In time however, they began to become more introspective and to some degree, protective. Posthumanity had long ‘congealed’ into geodesic structures, shelled in diamondoid, where they concluded ever more bizarre experiments. Attempting to violate the laws of physics as they had been traditionally understood became a pursuit for some domains, a pursuit some surmise caused their eventual downfall.

The Collapse

The precipitant events of the collapse were the literal disappearances of the Apex AIs, all vanished, the diamondoid complexes known to house them simply vanished from reality itself. Then almost as suddenly the posthumans Enclaves suddenly went silent. The A-gates and T-gates went offline, halting interstellar traffic and cutting off the technological infrastructure much of humanity relied upon. Even the Regressors, who studiously avoided the use of posthuman technology had used the transportation gates and found their economies in peril.

Panic spread through the Demarchy, the Apex AIs and to a lesser extent, the posthumans were responsible for the calibration and upkeep of their creations, no human intelligence was capable of performing the same tasks.

Immediately, Demarchists attempted to create it’s own posthumans without the intermeditary of the vaunted AIs, using the leftover scraps that still functioned, they uploaded several volunteers to a known posthuman relay… the attempted worked partially.

The unprepared human mind rebooted the posthuman empire for a brief second, but soon recoiled at the vastness of it’s realm, they had not been gently lifted into an expanded consciousness and were merely baseline minds vastly augmented beyond their capability. Fears and emotions fed through as virus’s, spawning a maglignant tumour that tore known space apart, the inactive legacy of the posthumans briefly re-activated in a pandemic of lunacy.

The second collapse of the posthuman ‘empire’ was catastrophic , A-gates began to malfunction wildly, producing crazed creations of a warped mind that killed and tore through cities with abandon, the starvation that had begun with the first collapse continued, as populations withered without the resources of the inner system’s solar powered hydroponic arrays they had grown lazily accustomed to. Some of course, were entirely self-reliant, but found themselves completely isolated.

Technology regressed further however, for some colonies this would prove their undoing, the calamities too great for recovery. Without the means to repair solar arrays, or advanced fusion reactors, they perished as the lights dimmed or writhed in radiation as the advanced magnetic shields began to flicker and die.

Others however, lived in robust polities, able to weather the regression of their technology, or shielded so much they retained most of it. Some relied on the good fortune of automated system’s, or patchworking them in primitive ways.

The Postie Legacy

The posthumans are seemingly gone, the AIs that they relied upon themselves missing. The Apex technology as it is know known, was for many years useless. The posthumans kept tight controls on their devices and only through the ransacking of posthuman complexes have the codes to reactive their devices been divulged. The first ransacking, occurred after a posthuman complex was hit by a comet, the codes acquired after that led to technology that allowed your a skilled datacrystal hunter access, either through accessing gates or using apex technology to blast inside.

Most A or T-Gates were completely destroyed, a mere fraction surviving in a inactive state, it is those that have survived that have begun to see the revival of the human race.

Attempts to programme assemblers to re-create A or T-Gates usually result in the creation of quantum irregularities which results in the systematic disappearance of the device and a large swath of the surrounding area.

Apex Technology

Apex technology is the pinnacle of post-human advancement, highly prized devices of technological complexity, they generally include technology that violates traditional physics, including teleportation technology, reactionless drives and casuality violating devices.

T-Gate: Transporter gates range from microscale FTL communications systems to the massive interstellar gates that link solar systems together. Smaller systems function like wormholes, while larger systems convert matter into a digital signal that is transmitted through a wormhole to another station where the matter is reproduced.

A-Gate: Assember gates are responsible for the construction of materials, from invididuals to weapons of war. They have self-contained energy systems of an unknown design and are capable of operating without material input. Most are heavily corrupted or lack access codes and cannot produce some of the more advanced technologies that were once available.

Datacrystals Fortunately for humanity, posthumans stored much of their data on system’s compatible with inferior systems in the interests of simplifying trade. While the A and T-Gates themselves are unfathomably advanced, they have secondary storage devices known as datacrystals, easily read by most polities then and today.

Datacrystals for Apex technology usually contain both a template for an item and a contract (DRM) for its production, allowing only a certain number of items to be produced. It is possible to duplicate the datacrystals, though this requires careful hacking and immensely amounts of power to re-encode the data (data crystal writing is horrendously more complex than reading), making it an expensive if worthwhile venture.

Known Space

Sol System

Mercury
Mercury is unremarkable,

Venus
Venus is still a deadly world, though the dense clouds have been mostly resigned to history through posthuman intervention. The world still broils in a toxic atmosphere and a atmospheric pressure three times that of earth.

Earth
Earth is the most populous collection of polities in known space, although the collapse wrought terrible hardship and though much of it’s once great cities lie in ruins, humanity still clings on in various forms. Some area’s of the surfare are highly radioactive, Earth had a incredible density of T-gates and A-gates, many of a quite trivial nature, without the careful hand of the trinity AIs they interacted in unexpected ways, often exploding in fissile and fusion explosions or worse. The majority of cities on Earth tend to be overcrowded metropolises, it's still burgeoning population it's only common advantage in galactic affairs.

Earth Orbital Domain
The Earth Orbital Domain is an aging pocket of power, corporate spacestations, asteroid colonies tugged into orbit and abandoned wrecks litter the orbit of the planets. Due to the number of T-gates in orbit, they are often a trade hub for Luna and Earth shipping.

Luna
The moon is the Sol System’s centre of industry, creativity and military force. It has one of the largest collections of working posthuman technology in known space, orbiting T-gates linking it to Mars, Jupiter and the Pluto Interstellar Gate.

Mars
The posthumans showed a unusual degree of interest in mars and several domains were located there. They cooperated with the Demarchists to gradually terraform the world and this was almost complete when the collapse occured. Since then Mars has regressed considerably, though it maintains a tenously breathable atmosphere, bioengineered plantlife survives only in pockets and most inhabitants prefer to reside within domed cities.

The Asteroid Belt
The asteroid belt is a diverse collection of polities, many of them heavily involved in mining the heavy metals easily obtained in the vast fields of rock, metal and ice. Considerable tension remains within the belt, between megacorpate sponsered colonies and the emerging Ceres Union, a supranational organisation of Belt colonies.

Jupiter

Jupiter Moons

Europa
The oceans of Europa were home to some of the most powerful demarchies in known space. The oceans of Europa were found to contain primitive extraterrestrial life, mostly bacteria, various forms of marine flora and emerging marine fauna. This was augmented, some say ruined vastly by the introduction of genetically engineered lifeforms for exploration, sport and food. Some of these cities have survived in various forms, while others sucuumbed to the environment. Among the stranger communities are those entirely adapted to the europan freshwater ocean and it's highly oxygenated waters.

Outer Planets:

The Pluto T-Gate
The Pluto Gate is the former body of Pluto entirely converted into a structure resembling a giant snowflake, one of the most staggering examples of posthuman engineering, the Pluto Interstellar Gate links to Alpha Centuri and Epsilon Eridani. A host of other smaller T-gates surround it, linking it to worlds further insystem.

Deep Space Colonies: Deep Space colonies include those not in orbit of a major planet or moon, though they may be located at lagrange points. They are extremely varied and their only collective feature is isolation from major trade lanes.

Zeta Reticuli 2 System

Almost twenty years ago, datahunters discovered the codes to the Zeta Reticuli Portal of the Pluto gate, allowing transfer to the system. The system has one notable gas giant quite close to the second star of the system. The presense of such a close Jovian type planet has discouraged the formation of any rocky terrestrial planets though the jovian has several large moons. The outer system is dominated by several successive belts of asteroids that form an unusually close kupier belt.

Olympus This gas giant is a swirling dark mass similiar to Neptune, though it exceeds Jupiter in size. The priciple worlds of the Zeta system are located in orbit, with one only world existing in the inner system.

Hades The world of Hades is a galactic perculiarity. At some early point in the planet's formation, it appears huge deposits of expanding gas became trapped under a hot plastic crust, resulting a network of huge bubbles shaped caverns under the surface. It appears the world cooled significantly soon after, preserving them to this day. The mist surface of this world tends to percolate down, resulting in huge stalagmites forming in the cave systems. Terraforming the caverns was relatively simple and they remain to this day, one of the largest open air breathable spaces.

Prometheus This world displays not only extra-terrestrial life, but also one of the most deadly environments in known space. Prometheus has a atmosphere that is some 45% oxygen and a significant amount of carbon, which has clouded this world in a thick greenhouse effect. Life here clings on in suprising abundence, thick fast growing plantlife adapted to a often random cycle of wild fires and mysterious insectoid life. Much like the tale of Prometheus, life here is brought to the brink of death continually, before being restored anew. Colonies were established on Prometheus, mostly on high mountain peaks or in the oceans, where the threat of the atmosphere was significantly less. The study and use of the exotic biota of the planet was the primary economic driver, though the collapse brought much turmoil...

Hephaestus
This is highly volcanic world and contains unusually significant deposits of uranium, radium and thorium. The unusual amounts of radioactive material present throughout the crust contribute to a staggering level of surface background radiation and several sites of naturally occurring nuclear reactors that complicated exploitation.

During the collapse, the mining colonies on the surface endured varying fates, some suffering containment failures, exposing them to a toxic atmosphere of radioactive decay elements, others suffered over a long period, while others still endured and adapted themselves to an increasingly fraught environment.

Asteroid Belts
The Zeta Belt is dominated by icey dwarf planets, comets and typical rocky asteroid.

Minor Systems

Other systems have been discovered, that were purely the purview of posthumanity. Their discovery is entirely random and demonstrate that posthuman activity was occuring across great swaths of the galaxy.

BPM_37093 BPM 37093 is a variable white dwarf star of the DAV, or ZZ Ceti, type, with a hydrogen atmosphere and an unusually high mass of approximately 1.1 times the Sun's. It is about 50 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Centaurus next to the Southern Cross, and has been found to have a 3000-kilometre-wide core of crystallised carbon, or diamond. Recently discovered after Zeft Brannigan discovered the transit codes in a posthuman complex located bizzarely under the old New York subway system.

PSR B1257+12 PSR is a millisecond pulsar located 980 light years from Sol, with three carbon type (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_planet) planets in orbit. The planet's contain significant amounts of hydrocarbons and useful metals and are the subject of a exploitation race in order to develop these resources.