TRNTverse Timeline (beta test, RFC)

[Prof.Pedant]

Mostaghanemi, T. (2222). 2070 - 2080. An Annotated Brief History of the Commonwealth. (47th ed., Vols. 1-12, Vol. 2). Tangier: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers Ltd.

One of the most significant changes brought about by the Roxolani Invasion was the change in the human birthrate. Prices for most goods declined as contragravity enabled the use of previously inaccessible resources, and as the cost of living declined and the economy boomed the birth rate began rising. Birth rates did not go up precipitously, and the average family size did not increase beyond three to five children, but by the time of its 30th anniversary nearly half of humanity had been born since the founding of the Commonwealth. Emigration from Sol System was significant during this time, enough so that in three different years the population of Earth actually declined. Still, despite an ever-increasing emigration rate the population of Earth, and Sol System, grew in most years.

Earth was, at first, hard-pressed to accommodate this population growth. Before the arrival of contragravity the excesses of the 20th century, particularly the dumping of carbon into the atmosphere, were causing a myriad of problems. Sea levels were rising, threatening coastlines and coastal cities, and ocean acidification was severely damaging the pelagic ecology, with many species of fish on the verge of extinction. Another huge problem was the increasing lack of arable land. Contragravity provided the means to remedy these problems.

First contragravity made transportation much easier and cheaper. Contragravity also enabled the generation of cheap electricity, the remaining carbon-burning was priced out of existence before it could be legislated out of existence. In the year 2044, for essentially the first time since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere actually declined. This was a tremendous assistance, but by no means a panacea – there were still significant problems.

Bain Realty’s invention of the floating condominium proved far more useful than just an increase in accommodations and the three-dimensionality of cities. It was quickly realized that floating and flying platforms could have more than one benefit. Platforms could also hold truck farms, growing perishable items that sell well in any city. Platforms also cast shadows; a 10-kilometer diameter platform a few dozen meters above the surface of the sea would shade that section of ocean. Strategically placed garden-platforms played a significant role in restarting the faltering North Atlantic Conveyor and other crucial circulation currents. Other platforms served as artificial reefs, as distribution spots for iron dust and other crucial nutrients, and as homes for the ever-growing population.

By 2070 Earthlings were better fed than ever before in history, had more spacious living quarters than ever before, and the population of Earth had increased to 14 billion people, with another 4 billion living elsewhere in Sol System and in other Solar Systems. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases had dropped precipitously – between the garden platforms, the restoration of the previous deep current circulation pattern, and the fertilization of the ocean with crucial nutrients had achieved remarkable results. Current thought is that the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, and the acidity of the oceans, will return to their Holocene averages in less than a thousand years, and perhaps in as quickly as 500 years.

Still, even with the dramatic increase in wealth, the similar increase in food production, and the advances in healing the planet Earth is still a very crowded world. Consequently the unofficial policy of every government on Earth – even those who express little interest in interstellar colonization – is that emigration is patriotic. There are lots of wonderful opportunities available at home, but home is not the only place with opportunities. That message is a constant one in terrestrial media, travelogues and shows about citizens who have found success on other worlds can be found on every national network. The temptation to emigrate is also encouraged by the ease of interstellar travel, with two thriving colonies – Demeter and Pachamama – less than a day’s travel away, and several others not much further away, it was possible to emigrate and still return for anniversaries, birthdays, and other important events. (Earth had then, has now, and may always have, the largest number of hotel rooms and the greatest number of tourists in the known universe.)

[archangel]

Glad to see the floating gardens making sure the demographic and ecological problems gets some resolution. Long term we might see Earth's population stabilizing or decreasing slowly as more people settle in other planets, particularly planets that are already well settled and developed without the need for a Frontier spirit.

Keep it up, Prof.Pedant!

[Prof.Pedant]

Originally Posted by archangel

Glad to see the floating gardens making sure the demographic and ecological problems gets some resolution.

I'm thinking that whole new cities come into existence composed of floating - either in the atmosphere or on the sea - platforms. After all, people need to live somewhere! And a lot of people like to live 'by the sea'. A lot of lunar regolith gets used in making the concrete for the platforms because there are no ecological difficulties with mining on the Moon.

The floating cities are sometimes collections of structures near each other, and sometimes they are huge structures themselves. One of the more common designs looks like a step pyramid, with gardens and cottages on each level. The structure of the step pyramid is itself housing, factories, etc. If a storm comes too close to the pyramid it floats higher in the water so that the storm-propelled wave action comes up the beach no further than 'normal' waves. (And it has an extensive artificial reef that provides lots of opportunities for aquaculture.)

Tall buildings start to have parking garages on the roof, at mid-building, etc.

Cities zone floating buildings so that the shade helps keep the town cool. Los Angeles becomes as crowded in the sky as it is on the ground.

Originally Posted by archangel

Long term we might see Earth's population stabilizing or decreasing slowly as more people settle in other planets, particularly planets that are already well settled and developed without the need for a Frontier spirit.

I anticipate instances of Earth's population decreasing in a particular year because of the popularity of a former colony or a space-habitat (the duniakota and duniakapal), but barring some extremely big event I don't see Earth's population actually decreasing on a decade to decade scale.

In my view there is a competition between people's desire for 'the opportunities of the frontier' and 'the benefits of civilization'. If people can emigrate to a new world and still get the medical care and telenovelas that they can in the Solar System that colony world will be very popular (i.e. Demeter and Pachamama). This 'let's go some place nearby' solution to the competition of desires provides a lot of impetus for expanding Luna City, terraforming Mars and Venus (and a world in the Centauri system, and....), and is behind the eventual construction of the duniakota. Real estate prices and rental costs on Earth make it obvious that a nice nearby habitat will make a lot of money....and the bigger the better. The sky of Earth acquires a lot of new 'moons' and 'planets' as the world-cities are constructed and take up positions around Earth, with the most recently constructed and largest being further away. Eventually most of the people that live in Sol System do not live or work on Earth, and the same with the Centauri System and the other older colony worlds. As habitat building becomes cheaper and terraforming becomes more skilled (and as the terraformed-from-scratch worlds like Mars and Venus become habitable) more and more of the 'frontier' of the Commonwealth is well within the borders of the Commonwealth and the expansion of the Commonwealth into new territory slows....for a while.

Originally Posted by archangel

Keep it up, Prof.Pedant!

Thank you. I wish I knew how to entice others to comment on and question what I am writing. The more interest I receive the more incentive I have to keep at it and eventually get this stuff published.

[Prof.Pedant]

Srinivasan, A. (Ed.). (2258). Brigadoon. Higginbotham’s Annotated Guide to the Inhabited Worlds (100th ed.). Luna City: Higginbotham Publishers.

Brigadoon (70 Virginis IV) was initially colonized by Sooner groups from the United States, Brazil, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Bangladesh, and South Korea. Most of those Sooner groups arrived separately but were able to arrive at a series of mutual agreements that made Brigadoon a tentatively united and law-abiding world from almost the very beginning. The Brigadoon Mounted Police, founded by the original agreement among the Sooner colonies, has a sterling reputation for fair and efficient responses to emergency situations. Another early creation of the Sooner colonists was an elective administrative council to govern the unclaimed areas of the planet and adjudicate disagreements between the various colonial groups. When Brigadoon became a Commonwealth Colony the administrative council both advised the governor and had a number of powers delegated to it. All in all, the reputation of Brigadoon as a law-abiding and welcoming world did a lot to bring colonists nearly 60 lightyears at a time when the fastest starships could still go no faster than five to six lightyears a day.

Brigadoon is an almost-but-not-quite more Earthlike than Earth world, each of the Sooner groups and the immigrants that followed them prospered, which encouraged further immigration. 70 Virginis (which the colonists named Fiona) is an older star than the sun, and is of interest to astronomers because it is in the beginning stages of becoming a subgiant star, so Brigadoon probably has only a few dozen million years left (there are theoretical, very theoretical, plans for moving it when the time comes). The other planets in the system consist of gas giants, uninhabitable rocks, and a very extensive asteroid belt that necessitates an alert impact prevention effort. (Brigadoon has a number of lovely round lakes and bays.)

Brigadoon has been a life-bearing world for most of its history, although one more frequently impacted by comets and asteroids than Earth was (which is why both of the Pthik attempt to colonize it centuries ago failed). Brigadoon developed life near the outer edge of what was then Fiona’s habitable zone, as the star aged it became more luminous and Brigadoon is now in the middle of the habitable zone. The planet has one ‘sine wave shaped’ supercontinent that the original surveyors* of the system named Síntonn, and three small subcontinents named Camóg, Lúibíní, and Tosaithe.

* Captain Fred Lerner, Geologist Jaime Loewe, Astronomer/Navigator Sirajul Ó Searcaigh, Biologist Marie Kilroy, General Assistant Geraldine Doyle, and General Assistant James McIntyre. Their ship, the RLE Ériu, was one of the three ships of the newly created and short-lived Irish Space Navy. The Ériu found three habitable worlds and a commendation from the Irish government.

Brigadoon has a 27.7317 hour rotation, and takes 2.37586 terrestrial years (751.31859 Brigadoon days) to go around Fiona. (On Brigadoon a leap-year is usually every third year) Briagadoon has a 19.9 degree axial tilt and two small moons, the outer moon is about a fifth the size of Luna and orbits Brigadoon every 33.17 days, the inner moon is about a sixth the size of Luna and takes 13.11 days to orbit Brigadoon. Both moons are tidally locked to Brigadoon and their orbits are in slightly different inclinations so that the two almost never eclipse each other (although each of them partially eclipse Fiona from time to time). It is generally agreed that the crater and maria patterns on the inner moon form a cat’s face, earning it the name “Ceiling Cat”, similarly the outer moon is called “Rosebud”. Brigadoon’s atmosphere is a little thicker than Earth’s, and the gravity is a little more than Earth’s (1.0324g); with the combination meaning that flying is about as easy or as hard as it is on Earth. In addition to a wide variety of flying native ‘insects’ there are four native genera that have the ‘flying niches’ well-filled (and many of them are as colorful and fascinating as many terrestrial bird species are, particularly the Rockys).

Brigadoon was incorporated as a Commonwealth Colony shortly after the founding of the Commonwealth. With Commonwealth support several additional groups and a great many individual immigrants soon arrived and Brigadoon quickly became the ninth planet to acquire a population of more than a million people, and, shortly after that, Commonwealth Membership. There were, and are, quite a few nice worlds closer to Sol System than Brigadoon (many of which became national colonies), but the native ecology of Brigadoon is quite human-friendly and despite the longer year most terrestrial crops grow quite well on Brigadoon. A particularly fortunate thing for the Sooner colonists is that a number of Brigadoonian ‘insects’ were quite happy to trade pollination services for nectar or other benefits. This enabled the colonists to get good harvests from the very beginning. (Some of those pollinators have been exported to other worlds because their services are so efficient.) The longer growing season also enables Brigadoonian farmers growing terrestrial crops to get at least two harvests a season.

Brigadoon has more good land than most habitable worlds. The surface is fairly typical, 67 percent covered by ocean, but the supercontinent Síntonn - by virtue of its being long, narrow, and sinuous - has very little desert and is predominantly temperate or tropical. Both the north and south pole are areas of open water, the freely circulating waters have a lot to do with the equitable climate of the planet. The ocean life is as tasty and nutritious as terrestrial ocean life is, the Brigadoon and Federated Folk of Fiona governments, as well as the Commonwealth Governor before them, have taken regulatory steps to ensure that ‘their oceans’ will never become overfished. (It is recommended that visitors new to the rivers, lakes, and oceans of Brigadoon only ‘fish’ with an experienced Villager (Brigadoonian). The native aquatic life is quite tasty, but some varieties are poisonous at certain times of the year or need to be carefully slaughtered. And a couple of aquatic creatures have defense mechanisms that fishers from Earth are not likely to anticipate.)

Many of the pre and post Commonwealth colonists, as well as post-independence immigrants, were interested in creating their own autonomous or semiautonomous communities, and the climate and ecological compatibility of the planet made it a perfect place to find or found your own Shangri-La (which is the actual name of a predominantly ethnically American** town on Brigadoon with a retro-affection for ‘suburbs’). For several decades the process was that ships would land at Germelshausen, the provisional/administrative/industrial capital, located on a huge plateau in the center of Síntonn, and the population of the planet would rise. The new immigrants would buy supplies and then head off to the frontier to seek their fortune, sometimes alone and sometimes with family or employment connections at a ranch, research station, farm, lumbercamp, or village. The Commonwealth agricultural bonus system provided some strong incentives for the colonists to domesticate useful microbes, plants, and animals. Brigadoon has been the source of several domesticates, many of which have become crucial parts of the agricultural systems of other worlds*** and contribute greatly to exciting Interstellar Iron Chef shows. (Many Brigadoon plants and animals strongly resemble terrestrial species, not in a ‘could be mistaken for’, but in a ‘could be from around here’ sort of way.)

** Ethnic identity on the various colony worlds is a fascinating topic. On Brigadoon many of the Americans ended up thinking of themselves as Americans who were happy citizens of the eventual Federated Folk of Fiona. On Franklin the Americans ended up thinking of themselves as Frankliners instead of as Americans living on Franklin. Similarly most of the Europeans groups who colonized Concordia ended up thinking of themselves as Concordians, but the small nations who colonized Lilliput think of themselves as [blank] ethnic citizens of the United Lilliput Nations.

*** Droobleberry, Epple, Juseu Mellon, Seutagwa, Fuelo, Yeat, Sae-boli, Nīla-ḍumura, Bhūṭṭāgulma, Puṣpabiśēṣa, Kows, Patata, Koko nuts, Snake Berry, Chocoflor, Hammath, Korn, B-nuts, Milho Grão, Rir Fruta, and Oatfruit are the most widely known contributions to human gastronomy and agricultural flexibility. Fermented foods (beers, wines, cheeses, pickles, and so on) made using native Brigadoon microbes are also beginning to win awards.

Modern Brigadoon is a multi-ethnic world, a population of 507 million people in a variety of semi-autonomous communities, a pattern common across the Commonwealth and particularly common among former Commonwealth Colonies. The most commonly spoken language is English, followed by Spanish, and then a wide variety of languages, depending on the region of Brigadoon that one is in. Brigadoon serves as the Sector Capital, with a Commonwealth Sector Court, a major Space Patrol Base, a branch of the Commonwealth University, and a Sector Governor (who, of course, has no authority on modern Brigadoon). Brigadoon is a major industrial center for the worlds around it, and has played an important role in the industrialization of the Pthik.
__________________

[Chris]

Pretty cool idea.

Chris

[Prof.Pedant]

Originally Posted by Chris

Pretty cool idea.

Brigadoon? Yup, it is a pretty nice world. And living there is so pleasant in large part because the original Sooner colonists managed to not make a mess of things. That set off a trend of "we are all civilized people here" that has served the place well. (Even the rioters on Brigadoon have a history of being polite and respectful. It helps that the Brigadoon Mounted Police have never felt that it was necessary to use more than a swagger stick and a camera/microphone to control a riot. Outside news agencies described the riots of 2095 that toppled the Brigadoon government as 'a massive role-playing theater game with no clear director and significant artistic success'.)

On another topic, just because it has been weighing on my mind for a bit:

Pirates, by definition, steal stuff and intimidate people. When there is a lot of valuable stuff to steal, or when someone is supporting their semi-organized intimidation efforts, piracy can be a profit-making enterprise. Without high value goods or covert support piracy is pretty much just a mediocre method for making a lot of people angry at you.

Early in the Commonwealth there was covert support for various piracy efforts, attempts to use piracy to justify various spending goals, marketing efforts, and so on. Additionally many early colonies could not afford to lose, or were willing to buy without asking questions, a variety of crucial equipment. These two phenomena provided an economic niche for pirates.

Coincident with that time period and extending beyond it was the 'colonial imperialist' version of piracy. This was a sliding scale that extended from 'making a nice profit selling manufactured goods to aliens and alien goods to humans' on the legitimate end to the mass enslavement of alien populations on the illegitimate end of the scale. With the massive differences in size and characteristics between the human economies and the various alien economies any interaction between them is disruptive, with most of the 'disruption problems' being in the alien economy. That in and of itself is not exploitative, but those inevitable disruptions provide a lot of opportunity for more exploitative economic interactions. And a lot of humans are willing to engage in exploitative economic interactions, and many of them have a lot of experience disguising their interactions as 'mutually beneficial'. And the further out on the interstellar frontier the more the willingness to wave around big guns seems to not have negative consequences.

This 'sliding scale' in both general ethics and 'ethics across distance' resulted in a number of economic interests who were involved with piracy/colonial exploitation on the frontier, but who were superficially to squeaky-clean at the home office. In the late 2080's and early 2090's this resulted in the Semi-Civil War, a combination of legal action against several organizations and corporations active in the Commonwealth, and military action against their 'rogue wings' out on the frontier. (One of the effects of the Semi-Civil War is that the Space Patrol does a lot more patrolling in the volume between 100 and 500 lightyears from Earth - which means a much much larger Space Patrol. Another effect is more transparency laws.)

Another thing that has been going on is that gold, platinum, silver, and copper reserves become first measured in the millions and then in the billions of grams, and then people stop bothering to estimate how much 'precious metals' have been mined. The primary cost of a gold necklace becomes the craftsmanship. Similarly diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and other crystal gemstones become a matter of cheap manufacture. A 100 gram diamond paperweight is easily affordable for anyone who really wants one.

Countries start issuing gold, silver, platinum coins again because the value of the metal is easily less than the face value of the coin.....and even modern populations completely comfortable with fiat currency do like the jingle of gold and silver in their pockets. (This presents another screw-up for the alien economies: even if the aliens only take 'hard currency' for their goods and services the humans can still easily outbid anyone other than another human.)

Additionally, humans are not going to - despite the proliferation of fiat currencies using 'hard currencies' as coinage metal - move large sums of money around as coin. Transferring a 'vast sum of money' between planets a hundred lightyears apart will be done by electronic-funds-transfer, carried by 'sneaker-net' onto a starship and then to a bank at the far end. When Scrooge McDuck arrives at "Boondock" the credit will be decoded and he will have his money, the bank will send a code by the next starship back to Earth (the world the EFT originated from) and that amount of money - which had been sitting frozen in Scrooge McDuck's account - disappears. If Scrooge McDuck is robbed before he gets to the bank on Boondock the money is still perfectly safe, since the thief cannot prove that he/she is Scrooge McDuck the 'coded credit' is just a bunch of numbers to them. All Scrooge has to do is send a message to his bank on Earth that the EFT got messed up and he needs them to send it again.

So, by the 2180's date of "Treasure Hunting" starships are not carrying large amounts of stealable money, nor is crucial equipment expensive or rare - a century and a half of almost uninterrupted economic expansion and nearly unlimited resources has seen to that. And the political/competitive basis of piracy ("such a nice planet, it would be a shame if something happened to it"/"Give us your all everything") has faced a century of overt opposition.

So, what could be in the pirate treasure that would be worth going after? The amount of coins they would have collected and not spent would be negligible - and even a chest or two of gold coins, while they would be more valuable for their face value, would only be worth a few year's income. Similarly with any jewels they would have acquired, pretty stones are now only worth their value as historical objects and as pretty stones. (If they find the Haldani crown jewels, and can prove that is what they have, that might be worth quite a bit....)

Any supplies/tools/technology that the pirates would have stashed away could be acquired at the Lowes, Wal-Mart, Sears, or K-Mart, on most any inhabited world - and would come with a guarantee, unlike the pirate stuff. If the pirates have 'bars of silver', silver is just another metal in the economy of the 2180's. (Although human entrepreneurs are still increasing their economic resources by bringing along a hold of precious metals and cunningly shaped jewels when they contact new alien species. Even those alien species who have used fiat currencies for millennia find themselves swayed when an explorer shows up with several tons of gold, silver, and jewels.)

So, in 2180 what would be in a pirate treasure trove that would be worth the time, effort, and danger of finding?

[Tucker Dwynn]

Maybe I missed it, but how fast is the Hyperdrive?

(x) LY per day or hour?

[Prof.Pedant]

Originally Posted by Tucker Dwynn

Maybe I missed it, but how fast is the Hyperdrive?
(x) LY per day or hour?

The original version flown by the Roxolani, et al, was able to do maybe as much as one lightyear per day (i.e. the air in their ships was usually pretty foul by the end of a voyage, and ships varied considerably in their maximum speed). Human manufacturing techniques fairly quickly (i.e. by five years after acquiring hyperdrive) brought that up to 5 lightyears per day. Over the next twenty years this gradually improved to 10 lightyears per day.

Over the next 1,000 years manufacturing techniques and theories about how the hyperdrive works gradually and intermittently improve the speed further. By 3000 CE a high-tech made (which no longer exclusively means human-made) hyperdrive can do 25 lightyears in a 24 hour day. This period is also when the Duniakapal, the world-ships, become common and humans (and others) begin exploring the galaxy in planet-sized ships carrying as many as a billion people. (Imagine living in an isolated human colony, one that left civilization hundreds of years earlier. Your planet's population has grown to be 10 million people or so, and a planet-sized ship with a billion curious talkative people drops in on your solar system. A ship with technology centuries in advance of yours. Or imagine being one of an uncontacted "15th Century" alien species visited by a Duniakapal.)

Since the stuff I've been posting is from various eras of the Commonwealth the speed of the hyperdrive varies, slower in the earlier settings, faster in the later settings. In "Treasure Hunting" the hyperdrive is able to do 10 ly/day.

[archangel]

I think I would like to live in Brigadoon.

[Prof.Pedant]

Originally Posted by archangel

I think I would like to live in Brigadoon.

It is a nice place to live. What other worlds and stories would you like to see?

[archangel]

Originally Posted by Prof.Pedant

It is a nice place to live. What other worlds and stories would you like to see?

Perhaps terraforming experiments on Mars like planets, and more about Huan.

[Prof.Pedant]

Originally Posted by archangel

Perhaps terraforming experiments on Mars like planets,

Ok. I'll write up something about the Commonwealth Terraforming Service - the folks with the long-term plan.....

Originally Posted by archangel

and more about Huan.

I'll be getting back to "Treasure Hunting" soon. And when I get all the way through - I'm just over halfway right now - my 'translation' of "Treasure Island" I'll start the 'real' rewrite and begin making a lot of changes. So all sorts of critiques, comments, and observations about the story _will_ be useful to me!

And, in the long run, if I can make "Treasure Hunting" be the story that I want it to be (a concept that is still nebulous) I'll write a sequel and call it "The Further Adventures of Tom Huan".

[archangel]

Originally Posted by Prof.Pedant

Ok. I'll write up something about the Commonwealth Terraforming Service - the folks with the long-term plan.....

Those are folks with similar minds.

Originally Posted by Prof.Pedant

And, in the long run, if I can make "Treasure Hunting" be the story that I want it to be (a concept that is still nebulous) I'll write a sequel and call it "The Further Adventures of Tom Huan".

Good idea, Prof.Pedant!

[Prof.Pedant]

Some more ramblings.


Mäkinen, W. M. (Ed.). (3073). The First 1,000 Years Of The Commonwealth Bureau de Terraformation (3rd ed.) Burroughs, Mars: Gutenberg Distributors.

Summation-Synopsis (Digression Level 7)

The Commonwealth Bureau de Terraformation has historically had two distinct roles. The first is to increase the human habitability of already habitable worlds. The second role is to render uninhabitable worlds human habitable (the most recent version of the CBT enabling legislation substitutes ‘habitable’ for ‘human habitable’). These roles are divided up among four different departments: Fallow Worlds (Mondes Jachère), Advanced Ecology (Ecologie Avancée), Agricultural Assistance (Aides à l'Agriculture), and Terraformation (Terraformation).

Most colony worlds are fallow worlds, the majority of life-bearing worlds where the native ecosystem did not - for any of a number of reasons - develop a biosphere substantially more complex than photosynthetic oxygen-releasing microbes. Terraforming fallow worlds is a matter of introducing a wide variety of life, something that is now more scientifically planned than the early ‘try anything’ (See Pachamama) days. The FW/MJ (the abbreviation on their IDs and shoulder patches) has accumulated a vast database of microbes, fungi, plants, animals, and the various alien categories of life (Demeter’s ‘planimals’, the forms native to Gamera and Ghidorah, etc.), the conditions in which they thrive, their biorhythms/biocycle regulation forms, and how well they have adapted to the various worlds where they have been introduced. A newly found fallow world is examined thoroughly and decisions are made about what sorts of ecologies to introduce - on many fallow worlds ocean life is only tentatively introduced because of how explosive growth of an introduced species can - as the Anvershi and Roxolani both found out on separate occasions - disrupt oxygen production.

The analysis of the fallow world usually produces several thousand to hundred thousand unique ecological models for thousands of locations across the planet. The general rule that the Fallow Worlds teams follow is to vary the models they use as widely as possible and to make each world as diverse and ecologically unique as possible. The addition of life from Demeter, Barsoom, Amtor, Roxolan, Pthikwertiloa, ka-Anvershi, John Galt, and the many other worlds with advanced multicellular native life to their repertoire, advances in bioengineering, and an ever deeper understanding of ecological interactions enables the FW/MJ to foster a wide variety of truly unique ecologies. It will be hundreds, even thousands, of years - local or terrestrial - before the formerly fallow worlds are as rich and diverse in life as the naturally advanced planets are, but the FW/MJ is doing an excellent job of assisting colonies with improvements to their planetary ecologies.

The Ecologie Avancée department has two purposes. The first is to assist colonists of worlds with an advanced native ecology to adapt to that local ecology. The second, and increasingly foremost, purpose is to study advanced ecologies for the purpose of providing information to the Fallow Worlds department and identifying new agricultural prospects for the Agricultural Assistance Department. Because the fallow worlds are usually easier to colonize and because a colonization effort on an advanced world has a high risk of causing a variety of extinctions the Commonwealth is increasingly steering colonists away from the worlds with an advanced native ecology. This also enables the EA department to maintain ecological study teams on those advanced ecology worlds, reaping the maximum benefit for the Commonwealth. (Those ecological study teams invariably end up serving as a nucleus for the colonization of the ae-worlds.) A recent study concluded that the benefits of the discoveries of the EA ecological study teams to the economy of the Commonwealth have, so far, been approximately one thousand times the money spent in support of those teams.

The Aides à l'Agriculture (their headquarters on Pachamama consists of two side-by-side giant A-frame buildings, an architectural decision that prompted some good-natured accusations of alphabet chauvinism) is responsible for the advancement of agriculture across the Commonwealth. Their official priority is the ability of a small non-mechanized and otherwise ‘organic’ farmer to make a living. Adapting a non-mechanized organic system to take advantage of mechanization and a variety of inputs is often a simpler matter than adapting a plant to grow on a world with a dramatically different day or year - many small subsistence farmers have benefited greatly from AA research and publicity efforts, but the larger farmers are the ones who have benefited the most simply because their greater resources enabled them to take greater advantage of that research.

One large focus of AA research is using selective breeding and genetic engineering to adapt a variety of crops to a variety of worlds. Another focus - at one time - was the development of a variety of affordable greenhouse designs that would enable growing a variety of plants not yet adapted to their new world. Another creation of the AA department are space-faring greenhouses so that the various Oases and other space habitats would be able to produce their own fresh food. One of the significant developments by the AA was the creation of a ‘1,000 forage’ seed mix containing several varieties of 1,104 different species that are tasty and nutritious to terrestrial cattle and other herding/big game animals (the mix includes plants from many worlds, and produces a variegated and flower-rich plain or meadow). Extensive work has also been done on producing both annual and perennial versions of crops with dramatically different season lengths. (The corn trees and perennial shrub oak are two examples.) The AA department also spreads information about, and seeds/cuttings/etc., new crops and new domestic animals (etc.) when they are developed so that the agricultural base on every human inhabited world is as diverse as possible. (With funding from the Foreign Relations department the Aides à l'Agriculture have also done extensive work on a number of alien-ruled worlds assisting them with their agriculture.)

The Terraformation Department has de facto - but often not de jure - possession of all of the uninhabitable worlds that could be habitable if certain things were changed. These are the Mars, Venus, and very ancient Earth analogs, and everything in between and off to the side. (Initially the Terraformation Department ignored the ‘fully-Venuslike’ worlds, but once the Venus Investasi Perusahaan was founded the Terraformers appropriated their approach and began building large sunshades to cool down the Venus-analogs.)

The techniques that the Terraformation Department uses have varied over time. One constant though has been their use of robot miners, and contracts with various mining companies, to extract as much of the mineral wealth of the planet as possible before terraforming. Initially the ore was used to finance the terraforming operation, but political competition from a coalition of mining companies, aided by some skilled rhetoricians concerned about the rights of the future inhabitants of the terraformed world to their national patrimony. This resulted in a requirement that the ore be stockpiled instead of being sold, and in the event that the interest of the Commonwealth necessitated selling the ore the money would be placed into a long-term guaranteed-not-to-deplete investment fund to be turned over to the planet’s eventual government. The Terraformers were still allowed to use local resources to terraform a world, an option that fostered the creation of considerable orbital manufacturing infrastructure near each world being terraformed. The ‘resource dumps’ that the Terraformers created have varied considerably. Ore might be congregated in a few locations on the planet’s surface, or it might be moved into an orbit about the planet or about its sun for storage.

In many systems refineries are built far from the star, out in the kuiper or oort equivalents, or on an icy moon. The earliest refineries were to produce consumables for the terraforming crews and - when appropriate - package comets for their journey to becoming an atmosphere and hydrosphere. Later, as humans learned how to build large refineries, this switched to refining comets into frozen balls of oxygen, nitrogen, water, and various appropriate trace elements (when this capacity came along it became possible to give a world like Mars a 1.5 terrestrial pressure atmosphere in less than ten terrestrial years). Refineries are also used with the Venus-analogs, once the unbreathable hydrogen-poor atmosphere is frozen out because of the contragravity-stabilized sunshade it is treated as another form of ore and either combined appropriately with volatiles imported from the outer reaches of the system or stored as part of the eventual national patrimony of the future inhabitants of the planet. (Those Mars-like worlds that were initially pounded with ‘comets for the future’ and then seeded with microbes have, since the mass refineries have become available, had their atmosphere/hydrosphere formation sped up quite a bit.)

The Terraformers have used two and a half different approaches for altering the spin or axial tilt of a world. One is, when appropriate, impact by the incoming frozen atmosphere/hydrosphere. This can be quite effective, quite dramatic (the film rights are always a nice fee), and the usually subsequent volcanism can be very useful for replenishing the surface rocks with new ores (and the sculpture possibilities are....fascinating). The second approach has been to install giant contragravity engines in deep mines and add or subtract to the planet’s spin. This approach is most often used when impacts are insufficient or impractical, and it both takes a long while and produces frequent quakes. The alternate approach to this did not become available until after the development of the dunia kapal, the world-ships. The ‘truly huge’ hyperdrives that enabled the planet-sized ships to travel faster-than-light implied the design of ‘truly huge’ contragravity engines that were able to create contragravity fields more than 10,000 kilometers in radius. This led to an approach to spin and axial tilt modification that many think is more dramatic than the cometary impacts. Two drone ships, each carrying one of the ‘truly huge’ contragravity drive (THC-D), hover over the intended location of the planet’s spin axis, they turn on the THC-D with a spin to the interior pseudo-gravity of the contragravity field. What happens next to the planet depends on the size, placement, and internal spin of the giant contragravity fields. Sometimes the ships use fields large enough to fully intersect so that the entire surface is smoothly accelerated/decelerated, resulting in a planet that receives a more habitable spin with comparatively little volcanism and quakes. Other times the fields only partially intersect and tremendous strains build up throughout interior and portions of the crust, always resulting in dramatic earthquakes, volcanism, and landslides. Because the entire surface needed to be terraformed anyway, because of the minerals that are brought to the surface, and because of the value of the film rights the second approach is used, at least partially, most of the time. (There have been talk of using intersecting contragravity fields to spin up a slowly rotating inhabited world, but because of the effects of vector change across the surface of the planet any meaningful spin-change, if done safely and with minimal ecological/topographical effects, would need to be done so slowly that it would take at least hundreds of years to reach ‘Earth-normal’. However there are plans for using THC-Ds to move various uninhabitable worlds to more congenial goldilocks orbits. Those plans will proceed once it is determined that it can be done with out destabilizing other planetary orbits in the selected star system [there are over 10,000 such candidates in Commonwealth Space].)

Terraforming worlds from scratch is something that takes a long long long time. The Terraformers have managed to speed it up a great deal, but even with near instant atmosphere/hydrosphere creation and robotic gardeners/stonemasons roaming the world building gardens wherever they go a recently terraformed world is easily distinguished from a recently inhabited fallow world, and extremely easily distinguished from an advanced ecology world. A fallow world will usually have extensive patches of actual soil, inhabited by native microbes, fungi, and other small life - soil that is often able to be planted or receive seeds and spores spread by the wind. A recently terraformed world has no life but what has been introduced, and usually nothing but what has been specifically and intentionally introduced to that specific spot.

The Terraformers spread as many things as they can from the air, but they have found that the only way to significantly expedite the process of bringing the world to life requires a lot of intensive ‘hand-effort’, which mostly means robots. A wide variety of robots are loosened, some to randomly go where they will and some with specific goals to achieve. One varied group of robots are the beavers. The beavers are tasked with damming up streams and rivers to reduce erosion, produce deep beds of alluvial soil behind the dams, and - in some cases - produce electricity. The beaver occur in a variety of sizes and designs so that they can efficiently dam streams and rivers of all sizes. The next general category of robot is the stonemasons, their role is to follow behind the beaver and build gardens everywhere that they can. On flat ground these gardens usually consist of a 1 to 10 centimeter tall rock wall and an interior that has been dug to between one and ten meters deep and filled with a mixture of locally crushed rock/sand/dust and organic material (with soil microbes) produced in the orbital CHON compost processors. On sloping ground the retaining wall may be taller, and many many hills and mountains are fully terraced by the robots (the stonemason robots are also used to construct a wide variety of buildings, after all stone is a really cheap material that can be quarried nearly everywhere at this point – terraformed worlds often seem to have a lot of castles). The third general grouping of robots is the gardeners. These robots follow behind the stonemasons and plant the gardens that the stonemasons built. Due to an awareness of the artificiality of their creations the Terraformers have the robots programmed to follow regular patterns in what they plant, even if they are randomly deciding what to plant in that spot. This has resulted in some rather interesting looking forests in particular (this same imposition of a pattern on a non-natural environment is also often seen on the dunia kota and the dunia kapal where the shape of the land itself is a required design decision).

The ‘ancient Earth’ analogs that were found were, at first, simply inoculated with a variety of microbes so that the atmosphere would begin becoming breathable by humans. Once mass-refining was developed the procedure became to both seed the planet and land a mass-refinery designed to work in gravity on the planet. The more mass-refineries available for that particular project the faster the process goes. Usually there is a portable factory in orbit turning out mass-refineries, with the result that most of the work is accomplished in the latter half of the process. The mass-refineries take longer to change an atmosphere in situ because the refined atmosphere mixes with the unrefined atmosphere, making each cycle of the mass-refineries less efficient than the one before. Consequently the most recent change to technique has been to freeze the atmosphere with a sun-shade and refine the ice; this is likely to become the standard technique in the future.

The Terraformation Department has done extensive work in both mirror and sunshade design, greatly extending the artificial habitable zone around many stars. Magnetic field generator research was already well-funded because of the usefulness in protecting spacecraft, and generators for spacecraft had become quite reliable and efficient by the time that a Terraformer engineering team began developing Large field generators. Their purpose in developing Large field generators was to create an artificial magnetic field for Mars-type worlds with little to no magnetic field of their own. Providing such a world with a terrestrial pressure and composition atmosphere worked well, but it was an improvement to the real estate that would last only a few million years due to the low gravity and the lack of a magnetic field. The Large field generators use a combination of contragravity and magnetic fields to give atoms and molecules that pass through them a shove towards the planet. Simulations show that the Large field generators orbiting Mars will maintain the atmosphere for an extra ten million years with no need for additional infusions of volatiles. (The easy access to flight provided by contragravity has resulted in a much greater interest in and sympathy with birds, bats, and other flying creatures. Many terraformed worlds end up with a somewhat higher than terrestrial air pressure just to make life a bit easier on the introduced flying species and facilitate the unregulated spread of life by air.)

The most widely known, and surely the most dramatic, use of mirrors by the Terraformation Department is Hoth (Proxima Centauri II). Hoth was a geologically and tectonically active world; the layers of frozen water and atmosphere were merely the lightest of the minerals that made up that frozen planet (the frozen atmosphere enabled some mountain ranges and volcanoes to become taller than they usually were on a terrestrial world with only a bit more than one gravity. After the governments of Pachamama and Demeter bought out the mining interests the Terraformers built a huge mirror with a radius of 1,111,111 kilometers to pace Hoth in its formerly cold three-month orbit about Proxima Centauri. The mirror is equipped with solar-powered heat pumps to keep it as cool as possible because Proxima Centauri radiates most of its energy as heat. Even with the heat pumps the amount of heat that modern Hoth gets is enough to make it a tropical world while the amount of light is only enough for plants that on other worlds grow well in shade or indoors. The mirror, because it captures light over such a large area, provides Hoth with most of its light. Hoth has a 33 hour day, and unlike a naturally habitable world ‘night’ is when your side of Hoth faces Proxima Centauri, a middling bright light that produces a dim night-long twilight. Day is when your side of the world faces the sky-filling mirror. For several hours before and after ‘Hoth noon’ the light from the mirror fills the sky from horizon to horizon, an omnipresent light dim enough to stare at and pervasive enough that the day seems bright. In the eight hundred years since the effort to terraform Hoth began the planet has truly blossomed and has become a fascinating world of houseplants run wild, lush meadows, impossibly tall mountains, and oceans gleaming beneath a pearlescent sky.

[archangel]

Good update, Prof.Pedant!

[Prof.Pedant]

An expansion of an earlier entry. There will be more of this scenario, suggestions welcome.

August 22nd, 2043:

The Commonwealth Bureau of Investigation gets a much-needed break in their piracy investigation when Inspector Jacqueline Clouseau, on Brigadoon to follow up on where the cargo onboard the ‘Black Pearl’ had come from and how it had come to be on the ‘Black Pearl’, encountered three of the faces that had been surreptitiously recorded during the Ananda raid. She was investigating a Walmart Storeship that had sold some of the items found on the ‘Black Pearl’. She was hoping to find out who bought those things and perhaps whether that person took them aboard the ‘Black Pearl’, or who did. Clouseau was going through the checkout line after having wandered around the store as a customer when she recognized the faces in line behind her. She quietly shifted her sleeve and purse cameras to recording them and then busied herself making small talk with the clerk and the three men behind her as she paid for her purchases.

Inspector Clouseau slowed down as she exited the Walmart ship, pausing on the balcony to look at the view so that the three men would pass her and become followable. As she dropped further behind them the Inspector summoned the drones that she had left quietly circling above the storeship and assigned a drone to each of the men. Clouseau was all alone on this world, the only CBI agent and she was not yet sure that the local police were not themselves corrupted.....and this NGO settlement was enough of a backwater that she could even believe that the local cops might not even know that the CBI existed. She continued following the men, relying on the drones to do so unobserved.

After they had walked several blocks the men stopped off at a hotel and Clouseau settled in at a coffee shop across the plaza to see if anything interesting happened. She did not have long to wait, she was halfway through her cup of coffee when two different individuals from the expanded tertiary suspects list - people who frequently interact with people who frequently interact with a supposed suspect - landed in a late-model aircar (one recent enough that it may have arrived on the same ship they did) and went inside. The thing that made this coincidence so interesting for Inspector Clouseau was that there was no reason for the two men to know each other or be traveling together, one was on the tertiary list because of an association with a lawyer believed to have organized crime connections, and the other one was a security analyst who had longstanding connections with an intelligence agency with a history of believing that it was operating five steps ahead of everyone else. “Curiouser and curiouser” she thought.

Clouseau sends in several of her bugs and retires to the back booth of the coffee house. A few minutes later she has video and audio of their conversation from five different angles. The five men put a high-quality commercial ‘bug-stomper’ on their private table while they talked, but that presented no problem for her networked equipment. Their two-hour conversation included a lot of incriminating information, and a lot of clues to where more incriminating information could be found and she had it all, in - as her grandfather would have said - “dolby surround sound”.

Jacqueline slept very well that night. Before she went to bed Jacqueline checked the Western Union schedule to see when the next communications drone was due to leave and found that she had plenty of time. The next morning she walked the twelve blocks to the Western Union office with an encrypted copy of her recordings and analysis for CBI Headquarters in Tangiers. Jacqueline arrived at the Western Union office just before it opened, coffee in one hand and a very tasty pastry made with a native fruit in her other hand. She leaned against a tree that the town builders had left standing and watched people moving in the early morning as she waited and finished the pastry. A few minutes later, promptly at nine-o’clock, an older man walked up to the office, unlocked the door and turned the Closed sign around to the Open side. After waiting a few minutes more to allow the man to get his shift started Jacqueline Closeau ambled across the square to the Western Union office.

“Good Morning” Jacqueline said as she opened the door, ringing the attached bell.

“Good for you maybe, but this is the first coffee I’ve been able to have yet today” replied the clerk, looking up from the huge mug of coffee that he was sipping.

“Will the coffee put you in a better mood?” Jacqueline asked with a smile.

“It will, so will some business - what brings you in here so early in the morning?” the clerk said, returning her smile.

“I have some messages to send off to the home office and to my family. I hope I’m not too late to get it on the next message drone.” replied Jacqueline, pulling a button drive out of her pocket.

“Nope, you’ve got just enough time. The next one isn’t scheduled to launch until 9:20am, and”, he paused and glanced at a screen, “it isn’t even half-full right now, so as long as your messages are under two yottabytes you are fine”

“Oh good. Nope, quite a bit less than a yottabyte. I’ve been scouting business opportunities for the home office, and while I’ve found quite a few possible investments I haven’t found that many! I do have a lot of video in there that I shot at the Brigadoon Zoo though - you have some really cool animals on this world.” Jacqueline said, cranking her smile up a couple of notches.

“We do indeed, I have a pet rocky - he is a lot of fun. Let’s go back and upload your files to the drone. I’m Mark” the older man said, gesturing to the patio that the back of the office opened on to.

“I’m Jacqueline, or Jack if you prefer.” Jacqueline said as she turned in the direction Mark had indicated.

“Wow! What is that!?!” Jacqueline exclaimed when she saw the photograph mounted on the wall behind a desk near the patio.

“That is a picture of a Yogi, they were named by the person who first encountered them.... That picture was taken by my co-worker last fall when he was on vacation.” Mark said, pausing before the image of the huge bear-like creature with its hat-like ‘horns’.

“It looks like it would eat anything that it encountered, including me.” Jacqueline drolled.

“Yogi’s are mostly vegetarian except just before mating season - Tupak says this one kept following him around until he fed it a sandwich. They are very curious animals.”

“Still.....it looks pretty dangerous, I wouldn’t want to go on a picnic if there were some of those around.” Jacqueline said as she continued on back to the patio.

“Tupak says that they can be annoying.” Mark said as he opened the patio door for Jacqueline.

“And here is the next drone” Mark said, indicating the gleaming metal box that was sitting open on the launch table in the middle of the patio. “Just plug your button in here and follow the instructions on the screen.”

Jacqueline did precisely that, the direct connection allowing a far faster - and much more secure - upload into the message drone than she would have been able to do over the local internet. Still, even over the direct connection it would take a few minutes for her terabyte of raw data and analysis to finish uploading. Fortunately there was a flower garden on the patio filled with what she assumed were native species. Mark was the gardener and she acquired a surprising amount of information about the local flora in the few minutes of upload time left. By that time it was almost time for the message drone to launch.

“Just let me check the net files for any new queries or messages that need to be sent and we’ll have this ‘bot on its way back to Sol System.” Mark said as he interacted with the drone’s interface and the launch table interface. Shortly he finished, straightened up, and handed Jacqueline a remote.

“Here, how would you like to launch your message on its way?” he asked.

“Certainly I would” replied Jacqueline, “Are we standing back far enough?”

“Yes, we might feel the drive field, but it won’t knock us down.” Mark said.

“Ok! Here we go!” Jacqueline said and pushed the launch button on the remote.

An infinitesimal instant later the contragravity unit in the center of the table pulsed and threw the drone a meter into the air. The contragravity engine in the drone came on; Jacqueline felt the air around her shifting to account for the sudden absence of the drone as it rose rapidly into the sky.

“I never get tired of seeing that” Mark said, adding “That sort of thing was impossible for most of my life, being here was impossible, even when I haven’t had enough coffee I still get tripped out by all of this.”

Jacqueline nodded, “It is quite something, five years and two months ago I was working in an office in Paris and being on another world never crossed my mind - and I had traveled often enough that I had become inured to how loud jets were, and we just launched something into space with nearly no sound at all.”

“I’m probably twice your age Jacqueline, I think I’m still in shock at all of the changes - and I’ve lived here on Brigadoon since 2141, I’m used to it, but I’m not used to it too.” Mark replied, still looking at the place in the sky where the drone was no longer visible.
__________________

[archangel]

Good way to integrate the narration of Jacqueline's investigation and Brigadoon's fauna and flora.

Keep it up, Prof.Pedant!

[Prof.Pedant]

Originally Posted by archangel

Good way to integrate the narration of Jacqueline's investigation and Brigadoon's fauna and flora.
Keep it up, Prof.Pedant!

Thank you. Did you spot the Hanna Barbera reference? (There is also an animal known as a Magilla that sort of looks like a purple ape.)

[archangel]

Originally Posted by Prof.Pedant

Thank you. Did you spot the Hanna Barbera reference? (There is also an animal known as a Magilla that sort of looks like a purple ape.)

Was it the Yogi?

[Prof.Pedant]

Originally Posted by archangel

Was it the Yogi?

Bingo! Eventually they get a nature preserve named "Jellystone Park". The species - a 10-foot tall, when it stands on its hind-legs, bear-like animal - does pretty well around humans. They usually go after small game when they eat meat, so adult humans are a bit larger than their usual prey. Yogis will go after larger game at some times of the year, but most Yogis - and very quickly all Yogis - are smart enough to realize that preying on humans is a really bad idea. Yogis have a rudimentary vocal language and are about as smart as a really intelligent dog (without a dog's adaptations to reading human faces and body language), but Yogis are not considered candidates for uplift because of the deep redesign of their genome that would be needed to allow for larger and more complex brains.

The Magillas superficially look like scaly purple gorillas with feathery tufts where their ears would be. Like other Brigadoonian para-reptiles Magillas are boneless, having intricate cartilage structures instead. This, along with their internal hydrostatic bladders makes the Magilla extremely resilient and enables them to use a hunting style reminiscent of the mythical Australian Drop-Bear. A Magilla will not hesitate to drop onto a prey animal from 10 meters up, and if the impact doesn't kill the animal outright the Magilla's claws and jaws are quite able to finish the job. Fortunately humans present a small cross-section from above and are therefore a poor prey choice for a Magilla, but it is advised to maintain a distance of a couple of meters from each other in Magilla inhabited jungles. Magilla scanning tools for your personal surveillance net are available at reasonable prices and are very effective.

[Prof.Pedant]

Asteroid B-612, one of Sol System’s preeminent nature reserves and tourist attractions, began its existence as a garbage dump. In 2041 United Nations regulations on the mining of asteroids, comets, and other minor bodies were passed that required all material disturbed by the mining to be maintained in the same orbit and required that orbit to not intersect with any inhabited area within the limits of prediction. With the larger bodies this necessitated nothing more than making sure that the dross and overburden not attain escape velocity, with the smaller bodies confinement in nets and bags was a necessity. Fifty years later most asteroid refineries were orbited by the remnants of their refining, bags of sand, gravel, and boulders. Some of the rock was used in soil production for habitat gardens, and a lot of it was used as radiation shielding, but combined those and other uses barely dented the supply. This was regarded as an inevitable non-problem - the asteroid belt consisted of shattered proto-planets, it made sense there would be a lot of rock - the ‘dross piles’ were easily created as a part of the mining process and the cost of the containment and a station-keeping contragravity engine were minimal.

In the early 2100’s dramatic improvements in the mass manufacture of huge sheets of ‘diamond glass’ (‘diaglass’) and the mass refinement of volatiles significantly changed the value of the dross piles and useless rocks of Sol System. In 2117 the B-612 Corporation was created by a coalition dominated by the Disney Corporation, the National Geographic Society, Angkasa Pertambangan, Casas Novas, Luna City, and Lǎng Wéi Yóu Tóuzī. The purpose of the corporation was to create a large low-gravity habitat as a research site and recreation area. Angkasa Pertambangan and the other mining companies in the coalition provided more than 15 million cubic meters of rock, enough to form a sphere 300 kilometers in diameter.

At the center of the sphere was a small habitat with several powerful contragravity engines, ones able to create huge contragravity fields able to move millions of tons. Surrounding the habitat are more than a hundred kilometers of boulders and small mountains, shaken into a close arrangement by repeated pulsing of the contragravity fields. Above this is a region of gravel, and above that a region of sand-sized asteroidal material. The boulders and gravel are interspersed every ten kilometers with nets that provide additional structural integrity. Radiating out from the habitat are 26 massive columns, each 350 kilometers long. The outer ends of these columns are connected by a net holding immense sheets of ‘diaglass’ in a sphere around the ‘artificial asteroid’. Once the diaglass shell was completed the interior contragravity engines were set to producing a 1G contragravity field that was 100 kilometers across. Then a mixture of air and water was injected into the structure, with the water settling to and flowing into the sand surface of B-612 under its 0.01997 surface gravity. Once the water reached the contragravity field nearly a hundred kilometers under the surface of B-612 it was in a 1G environment, as the volume between the rocks of B-612 became filled with water it infiltrated the spaces between the boulders and slowly began soaking into the pores in the rock. After several months the water level of B-612 stabilized to a point where everywhere across the world you could reach water by digging down a meter into the sand.

Once all of the liquid water had soaked below the surface an additional three meters of artificial topsoil - created from rock dust and composted carbonaceous asteroids and cometary matter - is added to the surface. At this point B-612 is sent spiraling sunward to its intended orbit 10,000 kilometers above the Moon. The terrestrial, lunar, and solar tides that affect that non-contragravity-protected majority of the volume of B-612, along with its 24-hour rotation, efficiently mix the atmosphere and allow for some very impressive storms to develop. Those same tides also regularly bring the water level up into the topsoil in several places on B-612. (There are also tide-driven and contragraivty-driven pumps that bring ‘spring-water’ all the way to the surface in several places, and each of the support pillars has a ten-kilometer-sized bowl attached to it that serves as the basin for a small lake.)

Throughout this process, and increasingly so once B-612 reaches its new orbit, microbes and plants have been being introduced. Now the 28,821 square kilometers of surface is more intensively planted with a wide variety of tropical and subtropical trees and other plants. Tropical and subtropical plants predominate because climate modeling suggests that because of the thorough ‘worldwide’ air circulation most of the surface of B-612 will approximate tropical to subtropical conditions. This proves to be true, even with the small ‘arctic’ and ‘antarctic’ circles at the north and south rotational poles. Rain and thunderstorms are usually small, but sometimes conditions occur that allow for some world-girdling storms.

Over the next several decades the trees and other plants grew quite well. Among the effects of their growing in low-gravity (0.01997 G, approximately 1/50 of a standard gravity) is that several vines will grow as bushes or small trees, willow tree leaf-branches droop very little, and many trees grow much taller and spindlier. As the vegetation takes hold a variety of pollinators are introduced, then populations of many many different small birds, small mammals, reptiles, and amphibians are introduced. Different species adapted in different ways. Many of the tunneling species - moles, voles, and others, did quite well digging in the deep loose topsoil. Many bird populations also did quite well, but many experienced difficulties with predators (cats, weasels, raccoons, monkeys, etc.) and egg-stealers (squirrels, rats, raccoons, snakes, monkeys) that were able to transit incredibly thin branches in the low-gravity. Many of the lemur, marmoset, tamarin, and other small primate species did very well under their new conditions. So too did the squirrels and small cats. Amphibians also did quite well on B-612, the atmosphere tended to the humid and rainy and the equi-spaced 26 ‘ponds’ at each of the ‘pillars holding up the sky’ were within easy reach of anywhere on the small world. Emphasis was put on introducing small species because of the smallness of the world, a desire to maximize the diverse carrying capacity of the world, and a not quite subconscious desire to make sure that nothing in the wilds of B-612 could seriously challenge a human being. Of the many thousands of species introduced to B-612 the largest ones by far were the sloths - who did very well indeed.

As B-612 began its second century many of the trees in its forests were approaching a kilometer in height, with roots that extended even further underground. By this time evolution was making itself known in a variety of ways. Many bird species, apparently in preparation for nesting, had taken to generally flying west when looking for food, foraging for about 30 out of every 40 hours. Similarly many species routinely migrate from one hemisphere to another to take advantage of seasonal differences in the availability of various foods. Sloths have, generally, ceased going all the way to the ground to defecate and this behavior change has enabled them to expand their range to the upper regions of 500 and 1,000 meter tall trees (this arboreal defecation is usually in the junction between tree trunk and branch and is fostering a huge increase in arboreal plants). They are also growing to greater sizes and superficially appear to be more active even though a B-612 sloth actually expends less energy in a day than a terrestrial sloth.

The small primates - the monkeys, lemurs, and so on - have also benefited from their vastly expanded vertical range. Since the gravity is so low a ‘jump with all of your might into the distance’ approach to fleeing is often viable against any non-flying predator, there is nearly always some useful branch or vine long before they fall enough to get hurt. Several species have learned to spread their limbs and tail in order to improve their glide ratio. Cats have also done quite well among the trees and have also learned that falling is not nearly the problem that it was for their ancestors. It is not uncommon to see a cat launch itself after a fleeing monkey, squirrel, or bird without apparent regard for what lay below. Once they have caught their prey (or failed to) they twist around in the same way that their falling ancestors did in terrestrial gravity and wait for something to come close enough to grab on to. Not infrequently they will spread their limbs further than their ancestors would when falling, and studies indicate that this change makes for a slightly but significantly improved glide ratio. The range of variation in cat paws is also now significantly more ‘hand-like’, enabling the not-yet-very-good gripping of smaller branches than claws can grasp.

The surface of B-612 is, except around the ponds and recent tree falls, nearly uniformly in shadow. It is rare for a beam of sunlight, moonlight, or earthlight, to penetrate all the way to the surface. However the curvature of the world provides for a slightly higher amount of ambient light than one would find in a similar forest on Earth. This means that the surface is generally poorly but evenly lit. Underbrush is usually rare, and usually well-browsed by the pudu, chevrotain, rabbits, and other primarily surface-dwelling species (most of which have been observed jumping or climbing into the lower branches of trees to feed).

B-612 is protected by magnetic field generators located on the outer terminus of each of the sky-support pillars, and the 200 kilometer-deep atmosphere - most of it at terrestrial surface pressure - provides additional protection against radiation. Still, the radiation levels on the surface of B-612 is higher than it is in most places on Earth and consequently all accommodations for B-612 staff are under several meters of soil, sand, and rock. Accommodations for short-term visitors are available in a number of very comfortable tree-houses, many of which have architectural significance. This higher background radiation level drives a slightly higher mutation rate, providing additional grist for evolutionary adaptations to life in low-gravity.

As the forests of B-612 have grown the B-612 Corporation has found it necessary to introduce more carbon dioxide because the huge trees were sequestering vast amounts of carbon. Additional powdered rock is periodically introduced as atmospheric dust for the benefit of plants with shallow roots, the immense network of tree roots is quite successfully extracting nutrients out of the water-soaked sand and rocks deep below the topsoil. Those roots are also reinforcing B-612 against the tidal stresses that necessitate the contragravity engine at its core continually subtly adjusting the orbit and spin of the little world. The B-612 Corporation also intermittently harvests a few trees, both for the unique lumber and to provide room for new growth (hundred meter long meter thick beams of tropical hardwoods fetch a very good price - and until recently B-612 was the only producer).

Since B-612 was constructed a huge number of habitats have been built in Sol System - Sol System now contains nearly ten Earths of surface area among its various habitats (many of which have significant areas in a ‘wild’ or ‘semi-wild’ state). This construction boom has soaked up most of the mining dross and previously ‘useless’ rocks floating around the inner Solar System, making the construction of additional biomes like B-612 locally expensive. However other examples have been created in other solar systems, some with entirely terrestrial life and many that use a variety of lineages. Many of the more conventional habitats also have a low-gravity park and recreation area, humans - like every intelligent species found to date - love to play in low-gravity.

[archangel]

I sometimes day-dream about stuff like Asteroid B-612 or artificial analogues.

[Prof.Pedant]

Originally Posted by archangel

I sometimes day-dream about stuff like Asteroid B-612 or artificial analogues.

That is precisely what B-612 is - a daydream made real. It would be a lot of fun to be able to travel through the trees like Tarzan!

[Prof.Pedant]

Abega, A.B. (Ed.). (2258). The Republic of Zhǎyǎn. Higginbotham’s Annotated Guide to the Inhabited Worlds (100th ed.). Luna City: Higginbotham’s Publishing.

Zhǎyǎn (Theta Draconis IV) received its current name because the shape and position of its continents loosely resemble the ‘smiley’ for a wink. The island continents of North and South Semicolon look like their namesake, with the tail of South Semicolon extending almost to the Antarctic. A thousand kilometers to the east is the equatorial continent of Guión, averaging 2,000 kilometers north to south and stretching across almost 9,000 kilometers. A 700 kilometer wide isthmus separates Guión from Paréntesis, a similarly long skinny continent that stretches in a slight curve from just inside the Arctic Circle to just inside the Antarctic Circle. Theta Draconis is a bright F9 star; Zhǎyǎn, the fourth world out from the star, is in an elliptical orbit that ranges from 2.83au to 3.2au and which takes 4.72296 terrestrial years to complete. Zhǎyǎn has a surface gravity of 1.081379G, a 30 hour and 17.3777 minute rotation, and a 29 degree axial tilt. The Theta Draconis system is younger and dustier than Sol System, providing significant asteroid-mining opportunities, good meteorite watching, and necessitating an active spaceguard effort.

The climate of Zhǎyǎn is mild, the open pole to pole circulation and the thicker atmosphere – half again as thick as Earth’s – do a lot to minimize climatic extremes. Unfortunately the planet is very geologically active at this time and land particularly prone to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or tsunamis – approximately 67% of the continental land – is zoned as wilderness with no permanent habitation allowed. This means that in practice Zhǎyǎn has about a third of the livable land that Earth does and more than ten times as much wilderness/recreation area.

Zhǎyǎn was a fairly typical fallow-world when it was first visited by Pthik explorers a little more than two thousand terrestrial years ago. Breathable air, farmable land, and mineable rocks. The Pthik introduced, intentionally and accidentally, quite a few plants, animals, and microbes from their homeworld and had a long-established thriving colony when Zhǎyǎn was hit by an asteroid approximately 20 kilometers in diameter. The impact was 2,000 kilometers due south of the main Pthik colony on the southern coast of Guión, what was not blown down or shaken down by the impact shockwave and blast was obliterated by the tsunami that washed two kilometers up the slopes of the Lóngdejǐchuí mountains (and in three places sluiced through passes onto the northern slopes of the range). The other colonies that the Pthik had established on Zhǎyǎn were all devastated to one extent or another, the impact was felt everywhere on the planet and the tsunami washed up on every shore at least once. Ships left filled with as many survivors as they could safely carry on their long journey, promising to send help. Unfortunately help was delayed by the Pumcetrakif War and nearly all of the Pthik who had been left behind had starved to death by the time that help arrived.

A generation later the Pthik tried to recolonize Zhǎyǎn, this time the colony was destroyed by a flood basalt eruption that occurred in the uplands above their main colony on the north side of South Semicolon, destroying it over the space of a few weeks. Very few of the colonists were lost, but much of their equipment and all of the results of their efforts were gone; and the Pthik Wolti supporting the colonization effort was not able to afford another attempt until two generations later. This time they established their primary colony on the eastern side of Paréntesis, only to have a nearby volcano undergo an explosive eruption that rivaled the Topa eruption on Earth 73,000 years ago. Shortly after this Pthik mathematicians calculating the changes in travel time from Afkegnufrig, the nearest settled Pthik world, to Zhǎyǎn (which they called, approximately, ‘Lunerg’) realized that in a little more than a thousand years Zhǎyǎn would be beyond the range of any Pthik starships traveling from any known worlds. (Coincidentally Theta Draconis and the star Afkegnufrig orbits are headed in nearly opposite directions, bringing Afkegnufrig closer to the core Pthik worlds and Zhǎyǎn further away.) The decision was made to abandon efforts to recolonize ‘Lunerg’ and most Pthik left Zhǎyǎn.

There were approximately 10,000 Pthik, descended from the few colonists who had stayed behind when ‘Lunerg’ was abandoned, living a near-stone-age existence on Zhǎyǎn when the Roxolani discovered the world 700 terrestrial years ago. They were scattered around the tropical portions of the continents and flying low-performance contragravity rafts. The tropics of Zhǎyǎn are a bit warmer than the Roxolani like so they concentrated on settling the temperate zones of North and South Semicolon and Paréntesis, coping with the long winters by alternating between the hemispheres (a Zhǎyǎn year is 7.08 Roxolani years long, few Roxolani perennial plants adapted well). Then, just as these Roxolani colonies were beginning to do well an immense comet came close enough to Zhǎyǎn to be completely torn apart by tidal forces, and chunks of broken comet fell on Zhǎyǎn for months afterwards, impact after impact, after impact. (Zhǎyǎn’s small moon Asterisco is thought to be a remnant of this comet that happened to enter a stable orbit. There is no mention of it in either Pthik or Roxolani records.) Both the Roxolani and the Pthik settlements were devastated by the impacts and their aftermaths. Fortunately for the surviving Roxolani settlers the nearest Roxolani worlds were only a moderately long journey away and no political difficulties prevented additional evacuation ships being sent to Zhǎyǎn. Unfortunately for the Pthik inhabitants of Zhǎyǎn they were the last to be evacuated.

At this time the Roxolani found several good worlds on the opposite – Sol-ward – side of their volume and there was no formal effort to recolonize Zhǎyǎn until humans entered interstellar space. The Theta Draconis system was examined by robotic probes and its history was discovered in both Pthik and Roxolani archives during the early years of the human expansion into space. In 2057 the Theta Draconis system was visited by the Chinese research ship Ziheng Yang, and some interesting papers were published on how the Pthik and Roxolani biospheres had adapted to Theta Draconis IV and its recently frequent disasters. One of these papers was covered in the popular press, which brought it to the attention of Wen Lee.

Wen Lee was an executive for Xiǎo Gōngjù Zhìzào, a successful manufacturer of a variety of mostly counterfeit products. Business was good for XGZ, but it had been better in the past. Anti-counterfeiting laws and enforcement had become much more pervasive over the past forty years; XGZ and other counterfeiters had responded by improving the quality of their goods and being more surreptitious about how their products entered the market place. With the 2027 Zhèngfǔ Fēnlí reforms producing quality goods in China had become more economically feasible, unfortunately for XGZ delinking safety inspections from compliance with other laws had not reduced China’s, and the world’s, increasing compliance with copyright, patent, and trademark laws. By the time that Wen Lee was reading “Savage Selection and Adaptive Radiation among seventeen introduced species: the case of Theta Draconis IV” XGZ was able to operate openly in only a few African nations, all of their other factories had to be very discreet about what they were manufacturing.

Wen Lee found the paper fascinating, a reminder of why he had always been so interested in biology. But something else about the paper nagged at him, so he looked up more information about Theta Draconis IV. He was reading about the evacuation of the Roxolani colonies when the thought at the back of his head finally presented itself. The problems that XGZ was having had to do with government interference, but at the same time XGC was dependent on good governance as a support for quality control, contract enforcement, and so on. What XGZ and the other counterfeiters needed was a good government that did not worry about foreign copyright, patent, and trademark laws. This was obviously not going to happen on Earth, the governments of Earth were too tightly enmeshed and increasingly so. But Theta Draconis IV was a nearly uninhabited world in a mineral-rich star system adjacent to two emerging markets. Wen Lee sat quietly with that idea for an hour before he began looking up additional information.

Wen Lee first took his idea to his bosses, presenting them with an annotated summation that described both the probable costs and the probable profits of colonizing Theta Draconis IV. He also outlined a number of industries and organizations that could be expected to be interested in participating. These included a number of other counterfeiting businesses, the growers or manufacturers of a number of illegal drugs, and various factions of the Maker Movement. What all of these groups had in common was a love of good government in their personal lives and an antipathy towards government enforced restrictions on what could be manufactured and sold in their professional lives. Wen Lee received approval to continue research on his new project and he began contacting potentially interested parties.

Wen Lee’s efforts fell on fertile ground, many illicit and shady businesses were interested in the idea of moving to a colony world with a government that would not interfere in their livelihoods. Many of these were small family organizations – the Botwin’s in the U.S., the West’s in New Zealand, and many others in many other places. A number of Latin American drug growers and manufacturers were quite interested as well, surveillance had become far too good over the last twenty years and the cost of bribes was climbing ever higher. Within less time than he had anticipated Wen Lee had a tentative list of 1,000 colonists, each of whom anticipated being able to entice at least an additional 1,000 people to emigrate to the prospective colony.

These successes brought Wen Lee’s team a larger budget and their planning efforts increased. Their first task as they entered the official stages of planning the colony was to file a solid claim to the world. Theta Draconis IV, or as the Roxolani called it – “Baalzepup”, was still claimed by the Roxolani, and there were a few Roxolani and Pthik living on the world. Fortunately for Wen Lee and his team the Roxolani government was in a financial crisis and desperate for foreign exchange. The team’s offer of fifty million Commonwealth Francs for the planet was gleefully accepted, and in exchange for a variety of consumer goods and having their small territorial claims recognized the Roxolani and Pthik on Theta Draconis IV consented to the change in sovereignty. Once they had cleared up the complications the team filed a claim on the world with the Commonwealth Colonization Bureau and an interim Colonial Governor and Advisory Team was assigned to the new colony.

Things were proceeding well so the next item on the team’s agenda was coming up with a name for the world. A comment by a member of the survey team they sent out to update the old Pthik and Roxolani maps suggested that the world should be called ‘Wink’ because of the appearance of the continents. There was humorous agreement with this, but ‘wink’ in English did not sound appropriate, nor did it in Russian or Spanish. However Zhǎyǎn – ‘wink’ in Chinese – sounded good to everyone. Further decisions were made about the alternating the naming of the continents, mountains, rivers, and other features between the four languages – English, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish – that predominated among the initial subscribers to the colonization of Zhǎyǎn.

The newly incorporated Zhǎyǎn Colonial Corporation hired the Xīn Huāyuán Terraforming Company. XHTC started off with two distinct tasks. The first was to introduce as much terrestrial or human-friendly plants, animals, and microbes, as possible (with a caveat that the Pthik and Roxolani life that had been adapting to Zhǎyǎn was to be preserved if possible). The second was to install seismographs and geothermal plants all across Zhǎyǎn. The seismographs were for studying the geology and quake patterns of Zhǎyǎn, the geothermal plants were an attempt to reduce volcanic eruptions by extracting energy from the subsurface magma chambers. (Many of the more earthquake and volcano prone areas are off-limits for continuous habitation, in those case the electricity is used to pump water or run automated factories.)

In 2060 the first formal Zhǎyǎn Colonial Corporation colonists arrived on Zhǎyǎn. (XHTC hired many of its non-skilled and semi-skilled workers from among prospective colonists so there were ZCC colonists on hand to greet the first ZCC colonists.) The organizations that made up the ZCC provided the first wave of colonists by recruiting them from among their workers and their families, the second and subsequent waves were recruited from around the world and from the relatives and neighbors of previous colonists. Since many of the counterfeiting factories had been located in Africa a number of African languages – Yoruba, Igbo, Zulu, and Xhosa in particular – became established on Zhǎyǎn. As with most Commonwealth worlds English is commonly spoken and is the default language to use with a stranger, but you can expect to hear many languages on modern Zhǎyǎn.

In late 2062 the population of Zhǎyǎn reached one million and a few weeks later the newly created Zhǎyǎn Provisional Government applied for membership in the Commonwealth. Membership was granted three months later and with new elections the Zhǎyǎn Provisional Government became the Republic of Zhǎyǎn. The colonists – all one million plus of them – had all been screened for their willingness to support a government that recognized only Zhǎyǎn-created copyrights, patents, and trademarks. The government that they created was a democratic republic that drew heavily on the text of Louise Windsor’s “Principles of Social Capital and Self-Governance”, one of the earliest governments to do so. Because of these two characteristics the RoZ has both an excellent reputation for the rights of sentients, manufacturing quality, and quality of life; and a very different reputation among the holders of patents and trademarks.

The Republic of Zhǎyǎn, Zhǎyǎn-based businesses, and other Zhǎyǎn organizations, have been investigated several times for connections to the pirates that prey on isolated worlds. Despite the assumption by many that ‘one sort of pirate is like another sort of pirate’ no connection, of any sort, has ever turned up. Part of this is undoubtedly due to the Zhǎyǎn Agencia de Seguridad, a national police with a solid reputation for fairness, efficiency and persistence. The ZAS reputation is so good that arresting officers often simply message the suspect that he or she is under arrest and needs to report to the station – the accused know that they are very unlikely to succeed in getting away and that they will not be convicted with false evidence, the most efficient thing to do is turn yourself in. (In recent years, if you make an attempt to run you will usually end up in some long conversations with a Gallifreyan-trained psychologist.)

Zhǎyǎn played an important role during the Semi-Civil War of the 2090’s as a resupply depot for Space Patrol ships heading to the rimward conflict zone. Zhǎyǎn’s manufacturing base was particularly important for this role. Zhǎyǎn was – because of its focus on being able to illicitly manufacture any popular product – able to produce nearly every product or repair that the Space Patrol ships needed. At the same time many Space Patrol personnel discovered that Zhǎyǎn was actually a rather pleasant world, despite weighing just over 8% more than they did in a standard gravity. (The Zhǎyǎnians describe the ‘extra’ gravity as ‘built-in exercise’, although the physical fitness of Zhǎyǎnians is due more to modern medicine and social pressure than it is due to the higher gravity.) The number of visitors during the Semi-Civil War resulted in an increase in immigration after hostilities subsided.

Zhǎyǎn University (founded as Zhǎyǎn College) has contributed significantly to the success of Zhǎyǎn. In addition to providing a solid education for many Zhǎyǎnians ZU offers truly excellent programs in ‘ecology and ecological adaptation’ and ‘manufacturing techniques and reverse engineering’. These programs have attracted students and researchers from across the Commonwealth, and contributed greatly to the involution of the ecologies of Zhǎyǎn and to the economy of Zhǎyǎn. Thanks in large part to these programs Zhǎyǎn has an industrial capacity that comes close to rivaling that of Sol System and an ecology more complex and richer than most formerly fallow worlds. The most recent success of the Zhǎyǎn Ekologicheskaya Inzhenerov – which is overseen by the ZU Department of Ecological Adaptation – is the introduction of seventeen species of whale and twenty species of dolphin to the oceans of Zhǎyǎn. The ZEI has also successfully introduced a number of migratory birds to North and South Semicolon and to Paréntesis, most of the introduced species have adapted to the much longer year by raising multiple broods during the long summers at each end of their migration route. (For several decades the Corvidae Project was located on Zhǎyǎn, consequently there are several varieties of very intelligent crows and jays on both North and South Semicolon and, as of recently, Guión. Fortunately leaving some food or money out for them usually prevents most of their more inventive thefts and vandalism.)

Tropical terrestrial life has adapted well to Guión and to the tropical portions of the Semicolons and Paréntesis, and a large number of oceanic species from Earth and elsewhere have done quite well in the oceans. The temperate zone ecology has been somewhat more problematic, although terrestrial species have adapted faster than the Roxolani species are recorded as having done. Overall though the success have enabled some very extensive forests to begin growing, often using a mix of species from Roxolan, the Pthik worlds, and Earth. The thick atmosphere has greatly aided plants like dandelions and maple trees to disperse their seeds. The thick atmosphere also makes flying significantly easier than it is on Earth, despite the higher gravity. Introduced birds and bats have done quite well, as also have several flying species from other worlds. The thicker atmosphere has also enabled quite a few species of terrestrial insect to grow to larger sizes, usually about twice as large, than they grow on Earth. One interesting side effect of this has been on the cuisines of Zhǎyǎn – several insects now grow large enough to have an appreciable amount of ‘lobster-like’ meat on them. (Fish and other marine organisms also tend to grow more quickly and be more active with the greater amount of oxygen dissolved in the water – many sportsmen believe that a swordfish in the oceans of Zhǎyǎn has more ‘fight’ in it than a swordfish in its native terrestrial oceans.)

Because of the nearly 50% higher air pressure wind and storms on Zhǎyǎn have more force for their velocity. A 30 mile an hour wind on Zhǎyǎn has the force of a 45 mile an hour wind on Earth. This has fostered an aerodynamic quality to architecture on Zhǎyǎn, with lots of domes and smooth curves. For the same reason there are also few towers or skyscrapers on Zhǎyǎn, most buildings are low to the ground – making the cities of Zhǎyǎn among the most ‘human-scale’ of the developed worlds. The Pthik and Roxolani who had been living on Zhǎyǎn after their colonies were abandoned used underground shelters and similarly rounded low buildings. Many of the smaller human towns and many human homes outside of the towns are either themselves domes or are located under a transparent dome. In the snowier regions of the Semicolons and Paréntesis there are resort villages whose dome is, in winter, surrounded by snow to a depth of several meters and the climate inside the dome is pleasantly spring-like, lounging in a beautiful garden and looking out over snow fields is an experience worth having.

The rest of the Theta Draconis system is increasingly well-developed. There is extensive asteroid mining taking place in all three asteroid belts, although since the innermost belt orbits less than a quarter AU from Theta Draconis most of the mining there is robotic. The next planet out from the star is Abrasador, a Mars-sized world that bakes under twice the illumination Mercury receives. The second world, Dìyù, is a super-terrestrial hell-world five times the mass of Earth and hotter than Venus Chistilishche, the third world, is slightly smaller than Venus and slightly cooler; a sunshield has been constructed for it and long-term plans include mining it and terraforming it in the style of Venus. The still crowded Middle Belt is outward from Zhǎyǎn, and the source of a lot of that planet’s catastrophes. Mighty Dokukurage – twice the mass of Jupiter – is the next world outward from Zhǎyǎn and the innermost gas giant. Dokukurage was intended to be the primary scoopmining site for the system until, to everyone’s surprise, life was discovered floating in its clouds, ranging in size from microbes to huge tentacled balloons. Since then the world was renamed with its present name and the scoopmining was moved to the next gas giant out, the Saturn-sized Vtorogo Velikana. The seventh world in the Theta Draconis system is Snowball, a large terrestrial world (1.27g) with immense deposits of volatiles and a thin hydrogen and helium atmosphere. (Snowball is the primary source of volatiles for off-plant industries in the Theta Draconis system and home to a resort whose visitors ski on carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and oxygen snow.) Beyond Snowball is the Outer Asteroid Belt, and the gas giants Yún, Oblakakh, and Congelador. Beyond the gas giants there is an extensive Oort cloud, with some comet mining occurring.

The Republic of Zhǎyǎn continues to count counterfeiters among its many businesses, and continues to face opprobrium from many of the other governments in the Commonwealth. However modern RoZ law allows for the enforcement of RoZ copyrights, trademarks, and patents. For an RoZ patent, copyright, or trademark, to be legally enforceable the patent owner must be manufacturing in RoZ space 90% of what they sell in RoZ space, the copyright owner must be distributing copies of the copyrighted item (i.e. available for sale, and not only in some obscure shop), and the trademark holder must actually be doing business under that trademark in RoZ space. Consequently companies from across the Commonwealth maintain offices and factories in the Theta Draconis system, and many companies use the system as a regional manufacturing hub. Those companies who are not able to maintain foreign offices and factories tend to think of this unanticipated consequence of Zhǎyǎn’s unusual policies on intellectual property as an example of the larger companies taking unfair advantage of the smaller companies. (Particularly since a lot of the large companies who do maintain manufacturing capacities on Zhǎyǎn are themselves engaged in producing counterfeit goods. After all it is legal in the RoZ....)

The bankers of Zhǎyǎn have a reputation for rectitude that rivals that of the Swiss bankers. Zhǎyǎn is considered by many to be an excellent place to discreetly store excess cash, the only identification that the bankers ever ask for is that a depositor provide proof that the person making a withdrawal is entitled to do so. RoZ tax collectors are quite efficient at collecting any taxes owed upon the withdrawal of any funds, but in all cases RoZ taxes on savings are reduced in ratio to the amount of time the money has been on deposit. This makes Zhǎyǎn-based accounts quite popular for long-term investments in an economy. The Zhǎyǎn economy is a complex mixture of multi-centered central planning, free market competition, neighborhood socialism. Nearly everyone owns shares in multiple different businesses, and frequently a neighborhood grocery store or other essential local business is owned by the people who patronize it. Under Zhǎyǎn law working for a business provides you with both a paycheck and a small amount of equity in the business, the longer you work for that business the more of both you have earned. The worker can sell that equity ten years after it was earned, but other employees, ex-employees, and children of employees, the company, and the local community council, have the first chance to purchase the equity. Keeping track of all of this stuff is the shared responsibility of a government agency, the various worker’s unions, and the companies. The same agency – the Bureau of Accounting – also administers the Census, regulates Banking, the Zhǎyǎn stock markets, Weights & Measures, and serves the local governments as an auditing service.

Modern Zhǎyǎn is a lush world. The forests have not yet reached full growth, but otherwise the planet approaches being fully terraformed. Paréntesis has a nearly unbroken forest that goes from pole to pole, the original assortment of Roxolani, Pthik, and terrestrial trees were supplemented over the years by plants and animals from Barsoom, Demeter, John Galt, and many other worlds. The northern forest is still similar to the southern forest, but the effects on climatic from the orbital eccentricity is fostering some divergence in the species mix. Many birds and other flying species have learned to migrate from North Paréntesis to South Paréntesis with the change of seasons, just as the examples of those species have learned to do the same between North and South Semicolon. Incidentally the two populations are definitely diverging despite having very similar environments. Both Paréntesis and the Semicolons have a nice range of temperate environments, and the ends of Paréntesis and the southern end of South Semicolon have boreal climates with cold rainy forests that sometimes get a lot of snow. Paréntesis has four distinct largely north-south mountain ranges on it, the result of the different plates that make up the continent coming together. Each range slightly or almost overlaps the other, in each case leaving a small area of lowlands between the ranges. This characteristic facilitates animal migration routes from the northern hemisphere to the southern hemisphere, and vice versa. (The elephants on Paréntesis average about ten percent smaller than their ancestors in Africa, but watching them migrate through the Ginnunga Gap with the antelope, birusapi, buffalo, camels, banth, cattle, wildebeest, sáv̱ra, plānṭagāya, hoppers, and giraffe, is quite an experience. As the northern hemisphere cools off after a summer that is more than a terrestrial year long the herds begin moving south, some of them traveling more than fifteen thousand kilometers over the course of the long Zhǎyǎn year.

Guión is a tropical paradise, with some temperate regions high up in the Lóngdejǐchuí Mountains (The ‘Dragonspine’ Mountains. The Lóngdejǐchuí Mountains are Himalayan in size, and they run from the east end of Guión to the west end, dividing the thin continent in two. The Equator runs almost precisely through the middle of the Lóngdejǐchuí Mountains (Zhǎyǎn is the planet in the Commonwealth with the most equitable division of land between the northern and southern hemisphere, on Zhǎyǎn the southern hemisphere has 50.1% of the land). The Pthik had settled the continent extensively, but the southern side had been close to wiped clean by a tsunami and the northern side had been nearly as culled as the southern side by the later cometary bombardment. Consequently, between the parts of the ecologies that the Pthik had not brought and the openings caused by the catastrophes the surviving biota had been under an intense process of diversification. The terraformers – initially the Xīn Huāyuán Terraforming Company, but later Zhǎyǎn locals – decided to use New World tropical species on the southern side Guión and Old World tropical species (Australia and New Guinea included) on the northern side. They were careful to build on the existing ecologies so that the result was a mixed Pthik/Terrestrial tropical continent. Both sides of Guión have a mixed monsoon climate, an annual monsoon season and a variety of less predictable storms throughout the year. The glaciers in the Lóngdejǐchuí range feed rivers which keep many areas habitable during the intermittent and sometimes long dry seasons. (Wells have been installed in some regions as well.)

North and South Semicolon are similar, but South Semicolon is quite a bit more mountainous – the results of the collision of three continental plates. The double collision raised up a huge plateau, the Meseta Jodidamente Enorme makes up nearly a quarter of the interior of South Semicolon. The Zipper Range marches off to the north, and the Vostoka Gorami and Zapada Gorami march off to the east and west respectively. Thus South Semicolon has four distinct climate zones: Plateau, Northeast, Northwest, and South. The Roxolani and Pthik had not tried to introduce anything to the plateau and little introduced life had made it up there. Plants and animals from Tibet and the Andean Altiplano have done quite well on the Meseta Jodidamente Enorme, their adaptation to a harsh environment has apparently preadapted them to survive well on a planet whose year is nearly five times as long as what they evolved with. The other three climate zones of South Semicolon are divided between the Old World northern hemisphere temperate and semi-tropical species in the Northeast and the New world northern hemisphere temperate and semi-tropical species in the Northwest (incorporating the established Pthik and Roxolani species). The South region of South Semicolon was seeded with southern hemisphere species, and incorporated the established Roxolani species. In each case additional species have been added from still other worlds, making for some truly original ecologies.

North Semicolon has two old mountain ranges, one on its east coast and one on its west coast. The rest of the continent is flat to one degree or another, ranging from rolling hills to nearly optically smooth plains resulting from ancient lava flows and shallow seas. North Semicolon was more heavily settled by the Roxolani and a lot more of their biosphere was introduced. North Semicolon also has the highest population of Roxolani anywhere on Zhǎyǎn. Consequently the ecologies of North Semicolon incorporate a lot of Roxolani life, much of it introduced since the human colonization effort began. With the assistance of human bio-engineering over a dozen species of qworl now brighten the skies of North Semicolon. With its range from latitude 10 to latitude 60 North Semicolon, like its counterpart to the south, has a variety of climates – but with no impediments to the flow of wind, waters, or walkers along its north-south access these climate zones smoothly blend into each other. Like Paréntesis North Semicolon has an annual migration, although obviously a much shorter one. Many of the Roxolani are involved in ranching and follow the diverse herds north and south throughout the year.

[archangel]

In Spanish, the Joder-Enorme Meseta should be the Meseta Joder-Enorme.
Keep it up, Prof.Pedant!