The Main Belt

Posted by: Madge Zolversson, Ego Hunter The Main Belt’s the kinda place you might get your morph hacked, or all your credits stolen, or end up in debt slavery on Extropia, or at the bottom of a cortical stack pile on Legba. You might also make a fortune selling morph mods illegal anywhere else, discover an asteroid with rich veins to mine, or you could just make a living tracking down all the criminals who come there to lay low — you’ll never run out of work!

Tens of thousands of asteroids make up the Main Belt between Jupiter and Mars. People like to call it a boundary between the inner and outer system, but I like to think positive and see it as a place for people from both to get to know each other. Radical autonomists and super-rich old-economy capitalists can coexist with Extropians and uplifted octopi, and they only sometimes try to kill each other. The Main Belt has no centralized authority and a diverse collection of habitats, so just about everyone can find a place for themselves if they look hard enough. Heck, a flagrant criminal on Vesta might be an ideal citizen on Extropia. If you just really don’t like someone or you have contracts out on each of your organs, you can just go to a different asteroid. The Main Belt picks up people, things, and information that fell by the wayside in the inner and outer systems. I would say it’s like a gutter, but that sounds so rude. Maybe think of it as a gutter with some exotic flowers growing in it.

While there are tons of people and opportunities in the Main Belt, the actual asteroids themselves aren’t as numerous as they look. Sure, if you look at the Main Belt from far away, it looks super dense, but it’s actually mostly empty. The total mass of those 181 million kilometers only comprises about 1/1000th of Earth’s total mass. The most common asteroids are these cute little micrometeoroids that can totally punch holes in flimsy parts of your ship — or even your own body! Isn’t that exciting?

Obviously, those little babies aren’t much use for mining. If you want to mine asteroids, you should go for asteroid families. Families are groups that cluster together on similar orbital paths and they often have the same composition, so if one has a metal you want, the others might, too. The major families even have names, and people know them well enough that they can help navigation.

Belt Stations

The biggest asteroids with the most stable orbits and rotations have the primary settlements. I’ll give you some highlights.

Ceres [1 Ceres]

Like Jupiter’s moon Europa, the dwarf planet Ceres has an icy mantle one-hundred kilometers thick that covers an unfrozen ocean twenty kilometers deep. The −38 °C surface temperature actually feels toasty compared to a typical asteroid, though. Most of the colonies on Ceres are Extropian operations, so that means more contracts for everything. Aventine is the biggest surface settlement on Ceres and it connects via a transcrustal elevator operation to Wujec, a bathyscaphe habitat with all kinds of aquatic uplifts and bioscience. Only workers live in Aventine, as the habitat’s primary purpose is to function as a transit waystation and shipping hub. Aventine has so little happening that it becomes a bit charming and rustic. There is a mass driver to fire payloads to the Piazzi station in geosynchronous orbit, I suppose. Nothing boring about firing packages with electromagnets into space! Piazzi’s just a refueling station, so most of the packages are fuel, but it’s also a smuggling hub for ships headed to restrictive polities.

The Consortium has a presence here via the Prosperity Group, which operates a half dozen habitats on Ceres. The biggest of those is Prosperpina, an undersea icicle where Prosperity Group manages its aquafarming, drug development, hydroponics, and vat-cultured food operations.

The big open secret on Ceres is the uplifted octopi cartel, the Hidden Concern. Whether through their legitimate business ties or their violent protection racketing, they insert their tentacles into just about every part of life on Ceres. They even control all of the wells used for travel to and from the surface through their puppets, the Cerean Transcrustal Authority. I don’t blame them for all the troublemaking. Uplifts have it rough, with all the prejudice. I just feel like they could do well for themselves without stabbing so many people.

Extropia [44 Nysa]

Extropia is the big ol’ market-anarchist dreamland. Anything you could think of two consenting sapients doing, they let you do. There’s no government, police, or central authority. Extropy Now owns the habitat and rents it out, but everything else is all based on contracts.

It gets complicated with all the contracts you have to sign. Security? Contract. Insurance? Contract. Medical care? Contract. Breathe the air? Contract! Legal help? That one’s actually a subscription plan. No matter what, you should make sure you understand contract law before you sign anything — or get an ALI that does.

Extropia has so many attractions to visit! The Drag is a straight shaft running the length of Extropia, which houses most of the big businesses. At either end are massive bazaars, where you can find just about everything that exists: electronics, drugs, information, relics from Earth, weapons, and so on. Most of the electronics I’ve bought on the Drag were super expensive, broke down quick, and weren’t actually what I thought I was buying. You have to go searching the side tunnels to find the good stuff.

The rest of Extropia is twisting tunnels and warrens. The wealthiest and most prestigious Extropians live in Bernoulli, a fluid environment that uses environmental nanoswarms to slowly change over time. I saw a chamber of snow-covered crags slowly transform into a carpet of red grass and perfectly spherical bushes over about a week. The Noodle holds the best chefs on Extropia and some of the best restaurants in the Solar System. I prefer to stick to Evangeline’s Eats, a little food cart on the outskirts. She makes a burger with exofungal truffle oil that’ll blow out your tastebuds. The Pits holds people who just couldn’t pay their bills or who are wanted for contract violations. They don’t get heat, plumbing, or even light down there. Heck, some of the shafts are still active mines. It can be kinda fun to try, but you probably don’t want to live down there long. Proudhon Terrace holds the Mutual Credit Bank and associated mutualist co-ops, so autonomists tend to congregate there. The Shop is the place to go for hackers and techies, both for gear and jobs. Vat City is home to Extropia’s vibrant body-mod community. You can find the best bodysculpting studios and every conceivable modification invented here. Lastly, V-Sector (the “V” is for “void”) provides a synthetics-only environment for powering down and getting repairs, free of air, food, and water.

Legba

Don’t go to Legba. The Nine Lives cartel runs Legba, and they will happily throw you in one of their virtual slave colonies for kicks. There’s one rule on Legba: you keep what you can carry. That rule applies to your ego, so if you ever take a break to sleep or even get a bit tipsy, get ready to make millions of new friends. Maybe they’ll stick you in a heavenly locked virtual mindscape and sell you to a voyeur. Or maybe they’ll just stuff your ego in a cold storage rig and forget about you. Or maybe they’ll just rip out your cortical stack and throw it in a warehouse with thousands of others. Those monsters won’t even clean the blood off.

Starwell

ExoTech is one of those corps that just worms their way into your life. The electronics you're holding? Name-brand ExoTech. Your last backup? Run on an ExoTech ego bridge. Your muse? Programmed by ExoTech engineers. Heck, if you're an AGI, ExoTech may be your last name. We're all locked into ExoTech proprietary software ecosystems, forced against our will into Morgan Sterling’s ExoCult empire.

Starwell is where ExoTech’s magic happens. The station is crammed with R&D labs and guarded like fortress. ExoTech claims they need to protect themselves from rivals and terrorists. To be fair, bioconservatives have attacked the station over their AGI development initiatives. ExoTech’s enemies say the defenses are hiding ASI research. Maybe. You'd have to ask Sterling, he always keeps an alpha fork on site.

Vesta [4 Vesta]

If you are in the Main Belt and want to go someplace with a slower pace, I’d tell you to go to Vesta. Vesta is the second-most massive asteroid in the Belt. The beehive and dome habitats spread out over the asteroid are all part of a parliamentary cyberdemocracy that uses the transitional economy model. A few hypercorps — wanting to strike out on their own without Consortium oversight or Extropian entanglements — work together to keep Vesta independent. Starware’s main shipyard facility orbits Vesta Prime, making ships they sell to polities all over the Solar System.

A mysterious personage known locally as the Dweller bought out a whole mining settlement in the Rheasilvia Crater on the asteroid’s South Pole and made it their own private habitat. I haven’t found anyone that’s gotten past all the automated defenses to describe what it’s like. Ships sometimes go in and out, but they avoid the rest of Vesta. All anyone can say with any reasonable certainty is that the Dweller’s super rich.