Earth and Earth Orbit

Posted by: Eludere

The former shining beacon of transhumanity is now the grungy, dangerous ghetto where you wonder how things deteriorated so badly and fear for your safety.

Earth Orbit

During the Fall, infugees flooded any habitat or satellite willing to accept their transfer. Refugees fled on anything that could be sealed tight and strapped to a rocket. Dozens of emergency habitats were constructed or inflated, and many are still in use.

Roughly three million still live in Earth’s orbit, surviving in the shadow of transhumanity’s abandoned home. Many cling to old-Earth identities out of sheer stubborn cussedness. Bioconservative and reclaimer memes are common, as are old-Earth rivalries, so visitors would be wise to study their history before trying to blend in. While infomorphs and synthmorphs are the most common morphs in orbit, they still face challenges including economic hardship, quarantine, indentured servitude, and discrimination.

There are hundreds of small habitats in orbit, some with residents and some long abandoned. Tin-can stations, clusters, toruses, and cylinders are all common.

The Fence

With the TITANs an ever-present risk of escaping the planet, someone had to make an effort to keep them bottled up where they couldn’t harm the survivors. That’s what the Fence is for. No one has claimed responsibility for setting up the blockade, but the assumption is that the Consortium supports and maintains it.

Over two-thousand satellites in low Earth orbit, ranging in size from sensor platforms to micro- and nano-satellites, monitor and take down anything coming into or trying to leave the kill zone (300–350 kilometers altitude). Signal jammers hose digital communications. Smart mines lurk, ready to swarm anything that moves, while hunter-killer drones catch anything that slips past. The Fence is equipped with almost every weapon imaginable: lasers, railguns, antimatter missiles — even old-fashioned nukes.

The Junkyard

Leftover rockets, screws, screwdrivers, boosters, and other junk form a thick ring around the planet called the Junkyard. The drifting scrap is a dumping ground for the locals; the debris is either safely burned up in atmosphere or more likely destroyed by the weapons platforms surrounding the planet.

Pre-Fall and post-Fall parts can be found in the Junkyard, ready to be pried out of discarded ships and sold. More exotic finds can be salvaged, including the remains of refugees, experimental technology, or Earth relics lost during the Fall.

Fresh Kills

Generously calling itself a “reclamation center,” Fresh Kills is owned and operated by Sugali Ali. Several thousand residents follow the direction of their four-armed “Pirate King” to provide a semi-secure base for salvage work in orbit. Don’t travel alone on this habitat. Tensions with nearby Hexagon make ships approach cautiously to avoid startling either well-armed habitat into aggression.

Hexagon

This fortress uneasily shares the Earth-Luna L5 point with Fresh Kills. Direct Action’s weapons-testing and training facilities reside on Hexagon and the company develops most of the Consortium’s latest military advances here. In addition to combat morphs and weapon engineers, the habitat boasts one of the most impressive sensor systems in the inner system, mostly pointed at all times towards Earth and its sealed-away dangers.

Paradise

Once a sun-drenched resort for the rich trendsetters of Earth, Paradise was overwhelmed with refugees during the Fall, leading to the habitat losing most of its shine and glitter to semi-permanent emergency camps. Recently Paradise has regained some of the old reputation, at the rumored cost of forcible relocation of less-fortunate residents. Increases in security have led to more rumors that Paradise is the secret face-to-face meeting ground for the Hypercorp Council for matters requiring more secure communication.

Remembrance

The largest station near Earth, Remembrance is capital to the LunarLagrange Alliance. Two thirty-five-kilometer counter-rotating cylinders provide living and working space for over two million residents. One cylinder is overcrowded and barely functioning, while the other provides healthy living for Remembrance elites and LLA officials. Remembrance is led by Mayor Nandi Setsin, a passionate reclaimer known for her abrasive leadership style and slick ability to avoid corruption convictions. Her rocky partnership with LLA President Avra Don has proven beneficial to them both.

Vo Nguyen

Led by Tate Markess, the Executive Director of the Earth Reclamation Project and spokesperson for the reclaimer movement, Vo Nguyen is a reclaimer stronghold and launching point for reclaimer activism and missions to Earth. Disagreements over mission approaches pit tech-savvy reclaimers against neo-primitivist. The station is secured against outside threats behind a cloud of space debris and killsats, but internal conflicts may get them all killed anyway if violence escalates.

Earth

Major cities across the globe were wiped clean during the Fall by nukes, orbital strikes, and antimatter weapons. Some craters and scars are even visible from orbit, such as the glassy patch that used to be Chicago. Mass drivers scattered pockmarks across the planet, following the path of TITAN advances and factories. Mid-Fall, the Pacific space elevator came down, snaking across eastern Asia and leaving a deep gorge in its wake across the continent. Nuclear winter has left Europe buried under snowdrifts and glaciers, while Africa is a parched landscape of deserts and firestorms. Massive nanoswarm clouds create weird local weather distortions from hail to tornadoes.

Ash clouds still linger, coating the landscape.

Getting to Earth

The Junkyard provides good cover for approaching the Fence, but just making a run for it is a good way to get splattered. The smarter way is to map the fence for areas where mines haven’t regenerated or where a large patch of de-orbiting debris can provide cover from sensors. Drones carrying nanofabbers and neutrino transceivers can slip into these gaps, with the intent of printing out a morph you can egocast into. Small, heavily shielded ships have a chance if they coast on momentum to avoid attention. Other options include a distraction to occupy the killsats or camouflaging your ship/bot as one of the Fence’s own service drones.

The Kilimanjaro space elevator is still in place though powered down, if a team has the fortitude to reopen that tomb. Lunar mass drivers are still programmed to rain death from orbit at any possible sites of TITAN activity. Their payloads always make it to the surface, so hitching a ride is feasible, but the landing is rough and may be in the center of TITAN activity.

Getting back off the planet is more difficult. For that, egocasting is recommended, but if physical transport is required, there are scavengers and reclaimers that make irregular runs to the surface that can be convinced to help out.

Exploring Earth

The discarded trappings of transhumanity can be found at every turn, abandoned in haste. Half-burnt cities, roads reclaimed by plant life, freeways packed with fleeing vehicles that never made it. Everywhere you find the skeletons and flash-burned outlines of the dead. Everything on the planet suffered in the wake of TITAN machines and nuclear attacks, so most animal life is absent too.

Treasures may be found in the ruins, but explorers must be alert for environmental dangers. Sinkholes and collapsing infrastructure are common, and getting around a city involves as much climbing and rappelling as it does walking. While most sites hit by nuclear weapons have cooled enough for fallout to be negligible, check to be sure. And without the protection of an ozone layer, clear skies risk sunburn within minutes of exposure.

Residents

Stalking through the ruins are other dangers. TITAN war machines still lurk, following their encoded directions to stalk new victims. Headhunters and fractals remain passive until new targets are detected. Nanoswarms resembling fog banks roam aimlessly for organic matter to flank and dissolve.

There are thousands of exsurgents left behind as well. The victims of genetic and viral manipulation, bodies, minds, or both are warped far from being recognizable as transhuman. Many remain at sites of old TITAN activity, continuing the tasks they were set to when the TITANs left. Entire cities of TITAN puppets — transhumans with hacked and subverted minds — go about their business, or pretend to be survivors to lure in the unwary.

If TITAN machines and exsurgents have survived the changes of Earth’s surface, so have the scrappiest representatives of transhumanity. Close observation can detect pockets of heat and infrared radiation that don’t match known TITAN sources. These spots of hope are tucked into the Ozark caves and abandoned mine shafts of southern Appalachia, the highlands of Papua and New Guinea, peeping past the trees of Vietnam and Laos, the caves of the Swiss Alps, warm spots underwater near where the Philippines used to be, and off the coast of Madagascar. Some of these may be bait to lure victims, but others may be signs of surviving transhumanity. And, of course, many survivors remain frozen in cryogenic facilities or stored away in digital form, awaiting rescue and revival.