Posthuman Spiral

Premise

Posthuman Spiral is a setting where millenia ago, the displaced working class of a thousand worlds fled the central power of the Sol Imperium to escape the oppression of the genetically-enhanced elites.

The Posthuman Spiral, the main area of the setting, is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way's and one of the most powerful of these breakaways, a place where oppressed transgenes and synthetics fled to control their own destiny by ascending to a perfect posthuman state. However, the denizens of the Spiral are a fractious lot, as there no consensus over what is a perfect posthuman, and some individuals have already moved too far away from humanity to be understood.

More worrying is the returning Sol Imperium, which has set its eyes upon the many polities which broke away from it with dreams of reclamation.

Introduction

The society that the exodus left behind was actually rather idyllic and utopian, with ubiquitous network technology, advanced medical science and increasing industrial automation that was slowly erasing poverty and misery. Humanity held dominion over thousands of planets and three times as many stars, connected by a vast network of space folding gates that made travel easy and instantaneous. It was this automation and utopian push, however, that created the underclass that made up most of the Spiral colonists.

New advances in gene therapy made the newer generation of transgenics increasingly more adept at all aspects of life than the human baseline, obsoleting those who could not afford the treatments, while increasing automation of industry displaced those who were forced into menial duties into increasingly dangerous or undesirable careers. In order to keep up and retain a place in society, much of the working class was forced to specialize and budget whatever template upgrades they could afford, filling the gaps in their abilities with cybernetics and taking on the most dangerous trades where they could not be replaced by machines. As time went on, these things ceased to be stopgap measures to climb out of poverty, and became facts of life for the whole of the working class in the Sol Imperium.

Reacting only to the increasing misery without properly addressing the causes or attempting to elevate the worker to their ranks, the elites of the Imperium resolved to abolish the working class entirely. Their initial solution to make use of artificial humans such a bioroids only swelled their numbers and worsened conditions by reducing the availability of labor in other sectors such as the traditionally baseline service industry. Eventually, the problem was entirely rectified by the development of true AI, which allowed for widespread automation of all industrial sectors.

By the time of these innovations however, the working masses of the Imperium had suffered many centuries of social stasis and economic decay. Community leaders of hundreds and even thousands used the Netsphere to connect, plan and coordinate a permanent departure from Sol's sphere of influence. This Secessio plebis was recorded in Imperial history in great infamy was the December Exodus, a sudden revolution where a trillion people of a thousand nationalities and backgrounds left the Imperium and scattered themselves to the space surrounding, completely disappearing from core human civilization in the span of a month. By the new year, the Imperium found itself gutted and drastically changed by the experience.

Billions lost their lives in the ensuing chaos, as the Imperial Navy blockaded major ports to prevent fleeing separatists and some worlds were accidentally starved in the ensuing quarantines. Those wounds like, those inflicted in any particularly violent and chaotic time, were cauterized by historical revisionism and the passing of hundreds of generations. After the rebellion ended, the Imperium resolved to prevent this tragedy from ever occurring again, and finalized the automation plan and became humanity's first truly post-scarcity economic system. Those disgruntled few who were stranded or could not flee were accorded special rights and elevated to the level of lowest of the elites in order to secure their loyalty.

Still, there remained the issue of dozens, if not over a hundred fledgling nations sprouting up around the periphery. But the Imperim was economically and socially ravaged by the revolution, and unable to stage an all-out war so shortly after what was an effective economic collapse. Unwilling to risk incident and planning for the far future, it waited, intending to return those breakaways into the prosperous and unified human sphere... some day.

The Posthuman Spiral

Millennium ago, the Posthuman Spiral was settled by a great exodus of people fleeing the oppression of the Sol Imperium. Formed of disparate transgenes, cyborgs and bioroid menial workers pushed to the edges of the society for centuries, the denizens of the Spiral set it as their goal to overcome all inequality and advance the human condition to a perfected posthuman state.

The Posthuman Spiral is perhaps the largest and most powerful realms on the periphery of the Milky Way, having advanced well beyond the technological prowess of the Imperium by its total embrace of radical transhumanist technologies and ideologies. It does not feature the same massive level of industrial automation as the Sol Imperium, but features far more ubiquitous fabrication and 'homegrown' manufacture network that allows it a great degree of economic flexibility. Having inherited the basic technological framework as the Imperium, it operates its own netsphere and gate network.

Still, the Spiral is not nearly as unified as some might imagine, and rather than a monolithic society of radical exhumans as the Imperium might paint them, is rather a large and prosperous confederation of city-states and republics inhabited mostly by high-level transgenes. While enclaves of radical exhumans and some posthuman singularity intelligences exist, the majority of the Spiral is a little more than a few generations removed from baseline humanity on a physiological basis.

The most prominent members of their society do perhaps lend credence to the stereotype of maddened exhumans, however. The strange and somewhat aloof Egan, who upload their consciousnesses to machines and operate terminal bodies to interact with their fellow colonists of the Spiral for example, are heavily responsible for interstellar trade and exploration. Other clades, like the Shaka, who use special netsphere permissions to surf between mindstates and bodies, are actually responsible for much of the Spiral's communications network.

Setting Information

Politics

Founded by dissidents of over a hundred worlds and cultures, the Spiral is politically and socially fractious to its core, with numerous styles of government. While most societies would fall under the loose umbrella of cyberdemocratic or liberal democratic governments, oligarchic enclaves and anarchist communes are a large and visible majority of the Spiral's body politic.

Apsis Free City-States

Widely believed to be the linchpin of the Spiral's military capacity, Aphelion was the first system settled in the Spiral, and stands on the whisps of the larger spiral arm in a sector of space known as the Arrival Cluster. It is the strategic point in a protracted war with the Sol Imperium, as the Arrival Cluster is the only region in the Posthuman Spiral with the traits to make it a viable avenue for easy invasion from the core: a density of gravity wells favorable for inter-galactic travel while being with sensors range from a number of major naval ports for accurate flight mapping.

Once it began colonizing nearby systems, Aphelion declared itself the first nation of the Posthuman Spiral and began the Apsis Free City-States, a collection of individual worlds spread throughout the Arrival Cluster that banded together for the purposes of providing mutual defense to one another and the rest of the galaxy by holding the region.

By controlling the Arrival Cluster, the Spiral is barely capable of retaining independence from increasingly aggressive Imperial policy. Without easy access to the jump points, the Imperial Navy would be forced to follow the scant trail of stars between the two galaxies to carry out an invasion.

Aphelion

The leading city-state of the AFCS is cosmopolitan and progressive, but also strangely static about opinions of the Imperium and the other breakaways. A vast terraformed moon in the orbit of a Neptune-like gas giant that came to become the home of a vast ecumenopolis. Their culture is effectively the oldest in the Spiral, and despite the apparent vehemence towards the Sol Imperium, is also the closest to that of core human civilization. Colonists on Aphelion came from every world and ethnicity, and somehow managed to assimilate with minimal cultural mosaicism. While ethnic boroughs are still somewhat common, most citizens consider themselves wholly Aphelian.

Politically, Aphelion is something of a strange collision of a direct democracy with jingoism and militaristic patriotism. The streets and terraces of an otherwise classical and mature ecumenopolis are littered with patriotic bunting, iconic banners and propaganda posters. Nearly every citizen has a full military skillsoft set implanted in their teens and qualifies as a reservist. Exhumanism in service to the state and Spiral are seen as virtuous, and the Aphelion keeps the largest population of military Egans in the entire Spiral.

Widely recognized for their hardtech engineering and cybernetics, Aphelion also hosts major shipbuilding facilities and is one of the leading arms manufacturers in the Spiral.

Apogee

The only other major player in the AFCS with the political power to unilaterally check Aphelion's militarism, Apogee is an important center of research the Spiral. It is sparsely colonized, but managed to successfully construct a Jupiter Brain in the outer orbit of its main star thanks to foreign aid and an especially large terraforming fleet. Subsequently, the system became one of the progenitors of the Spiral's netsphere and attracted talents from all over the galaxy.

While network access is ubiquitous in the rest of the the Posthuman Spiral, it's absolutely essential in systems like Apogee. Nearly an eight of the billions of people who dwell in-system are not actually active, but either mindstates running on the central processor or in dormant bodies accessing the Netsphere.

Other

The remaining hundred systems of the AFCS are still sprawling civilizations that dwarf humanity's scope during the first ten thousand years of recorded history. A few notable systems like Avicenna and Brahe are notable enough to have a meaningful impact on wider political movements in the in the Arrival Cluster, but the majority are simply a drop in a bucket of billions.

Kepler Enclaves

The Kepler Enclaves are coalition of thousands of small scientific enclaves modeled after Apogee, each featuring one or more Jupiter-brain class megaprocessors in their sovereign systems acting as major server nodes for the Spiral's all-encompassing Netsphere. Appropriately, the majority of the citizenry in the Enclaves actually do not have permanent bodies and interact mostly though the netsphere, where they have a vast and functional digital democracy that manages to string together a population one eighth the size of the League into a functional government. In foreign matters, they are politically neutral, only concerning themselves with the continuing operation of the network and the free flow of information, although they favor the Ispano League and Apogee over the other other political blocs of the Spiral.

Most Enclave members are adherents to Techno-Messianism, a religion that seems to combine the syncretic post-Anglican doctrines of some Sol Imperium worlds with a belief in an afterlife created through the netsphere. Most citizens of the Enclave alternate between cyberspace and realspace existences, switching back and forth every one or two generations in order to retain fresh perspectives.

The Enclaves maintain their own standing military, known as the Safeguard, and the anti-cyberterror organization Ghost Line. Both are widely regarded as competent and efficient paramilitary agencies on the level of national special forces. While some nations are reticent about allowing Kepler task forces in their territory, the majority acquiesce largely out of good will to the Enclaves and also as a means of avoiding censure. Who would, after all, want to appear as an enemy of free information?

Safeguard

The Safeguard are a paramilitary force number in the millions, with several hundred capital ships and thousands of workhorse vessels such as frigates and destroyers. The Safeguard are distinctive for abandoning traditional bodies and sleeving into pure combat units, as well as their unique insertion method. Most Safeguard assaults have them hijacking a local fabricator and deploying a body directly into the field because sending a consciousness to it.

Ghost Line

Ghost Line is an anti-terror task force established by the Enclave to protect their interests and stop subtle existential threats to the netsphere. Rogue hyper-hackers, intelligent memetic plagues and maddened singularity intelligences pose serious risks to the continued function of the network and the Posthuman Spiral at large. With official jurisdiction in the entire galaxy, they act to protect both nation and network... at any cost.

Ispano League

The Spiral's largest democracy and often considered the heart of its political and cultural scene, Ispano is a multiparty representative democracy consisting of a several hundred worlds. The majority of these states operate as digital democracies on the planetary level, although it does very little to alleviate the political tensions between the various signatory states in the League. The League is heavily centralized economically and politically, with most of its resources going into construction efforts in the main systems of Sol Dios, Asturia and Milesia.

The unfortunate political situation could be considered a consequence of 90% of the Ispano's population dwelling in a handful of systems, despite holding hundreds. Outlying states and new colonies suffer extensive a sort of tyranny of the masses as the electoral power of their representatives is measured by population and seniority in membership. Some systems have considered breaking away, while some rising stars have pulled themselves from the lowly minority houses and have closed the gap with extensive cloning and bioroids, often using randomized versions of extremely standard or cookie cutter personality templates. As a consequence, the society that prides itself on culture has a disturbing trend towards uniformity towards its fringes.

Despite the apparent failure of their democracy, the Ispano are the premier megastructure engineers of the Spiral. Using the funds collected, they succeeded in constructing a number of globus cassus structures, essentially vast hollow worlds with ten times the landmass of an Earthlike planet, which house dozens of billions. They're also responsible for the initial completion of Apogee's netsphere hub, and the subsequent creation of the galactic netsphere system.

Rumors abound that the Ispano are building a Dyson sphere-like weapon designed to fire quasars into distant solar systems, but such rumors are largely unfounded. No society, let along the League, has the industrial capacity to build a weapon that can harness suns in such a manner.

Archetypes

Just as it is divided politically, there are also major philosophical lines and groups in the Spiral as the colonists continue to experiment with increasingly exotic and strange expressions of their transhumanity. The major groups are well known, the Egan, Shaka and