Locations

Habitats in Sol’s corona face challenges more extreme than those anywhere else in the system. Transhumanity’s only means of shielding a habitat from the heat and radiation emitted by a G2 star is to generate strong electromagnetic fields. Even then, the dangers posed by solar ares and coronal mass ejections—massive explosions that jettison coronal material tens of thousands of kilometers out into circumsolar space—mean that the sun’s polar regions are the only safe space in which to position habitats.

During the political chaos and warfare of the Fall, many space industry corporations pushed their work forces to the limits. Already suffering under extremely poor working conditions, the primarily synth-sleeved and indentured workers of Hindustan Aerospace Limited (HAL), working in the shipyards stationed in Lunar orbit, called a general strike.

The closest planet to the sun has a mass comparable to Luna but is a great deal denser due to its iron-nickel core. Mercury rotates slowly and has no atmosphere, so that its day side is hot enough to melt most metals, while its night side is bitterly cold. Because it lacks many of the elements needed for transhuman colonies to be self-sufficient, Mercury is sparsely inhabited, save for a handful of solar power relays, a few underground mining stations, and a single large surface mining concern, Cannon.

Venus is Earth’s closest neighbor and the planet most like it in terms of size and geology. It is a rugged world of volcanic mountains, canyons, high plateaus, and sweeping volcanic planes crisscrossed by river-like magma channels. Much of the surface is basaltic rock. The climate of Venus is one of the most inhospitable in the solar system. Perhaps only the hideous radiation of the inner Jovian moons presents a more difficult challenge to transhuman colonization.

Ecologically devastated and infested by the weird spawn of the TITANs, transhumanity’s homeworld doesn’t get many visitors. Earth’s once-populous urban regions are massive sprawls ruined by war and heavy weather, infested with dangerous artificial life and the occasional survivalist gang. Elsewhere, irradiated blast zones and desolate wasteland prevail. Due to harsh climatic conditions, the wilderness has been slow to reassert itself. Vast swaths of dead forest or burned grassland are common sights.

Earth was the cradle of transhuman civilization, but Mars, with a population of 200 million, is now its heartland. When humanity began its spaceward diaspora, Luna was its first stop. Yet while Luna boasts a sizable population, Mars was the first world humans settled where they could thrive entirely on locally available resources.

Spread out over a massive region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the Main Belt contains a few hundred asteroids greater than 100 kilometers in diameter, over a thousand objects greater than 30 kilometers in size, and countless smaller ones. Despite this, the total mass of asteroids in the belt is only a fraction of one of the inner planets, meaning that asteroids are spread out over great distances. A spacecraft flying through the belt is highly unlikely to encounter an asteroid unless it deliberately navigates toward it.

Large enough that it could almost have formed the nucleus of a protostar in its own right, Jupiter’s massive size makes the Jovian system one of the most challenging places in the system to colonize. Jupiter’s powerful magnetic eld means that its inner moons— and the outer ones, when their orbits pass through its immense magnetotail—are bombarded with enough ionizing radiation to kill transhumans not protected by the heaviest of shielding within a matter of hours.

The second largest planet in the system is a much more favorable habitat for transhumans than Jupiter. Saturn’s lower gravity and milder magnetosphere are a boon to gas mining operations, and for resource-hungry habs, the rings are a feast (literally, in the case of the new Hamilton cylinder type habitats). Hypercorps have a presence here, but any major expansion by the Planetary Consortium is kept in check by the anarchist stations of the rings and the technosocialist commonwealth of Titan.

Once thought of as gas giants like Saturn and Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune differ from the larger planets in that they contain large amounts of water ice, methane, and ammonia and have rocky cores at their centers. This region of the system is sparsely populated. Uranus orbits at a distance 10 AU beyond the orbit of Saturn, 20 times the distance of the Earth from the sun.

Lying just past the orbit of Neptune is a disc of ice and dust known as the Kuiper Belt. It is home to over a hundred planetoids, including Pluto, Haumea, and Eris, and thousands of asteroids large enough to conceal a habitat. Most Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) are a mix of ice and rock which pre-date the genesis of the sun. Though sparsely populated, most transhuman activity takes place in the “classical” Kuiper Belt, between 42 and 48 AU, where frozen volatiles, complex organic molecules, and rare minerals are more easily harvested.

Frigid, swept by 2,100 km/h winds, and tinged blue by methane traces in its atmosphere, Neptune is the last major planet in the system, orbiting at a distance of 30 AU from the sun. This far from the nearest star, plants will not grow and solar power is useless. The only sources of power are fusion, focused starlight, waste heat, and chemical reactions. The hypercorp presence in the Neptunian system is virtually absent, as the long communication lags and extreme travel distances from the rest of the solar system mean that few Neptunian ventures garner pro ts.

The Oort Cloud is a sphere of dust and asteroids that extends to the edge of the gravitational reach of the sun. The difficulties of life without infrastructure in the Kuiper Belt are compounded in the Oort Cloud. Because of this, the transhuman population in the Oort Cloud is less than 15,000, almost all restricted to a handful of ships and research outposts within the Inner Oort Cloud.