Saturn

Posted by: Isabella Dandolo, Firewall Proxy

The smaller of our system’s two gas giants is Jupiter’s cool sibling. Everyone here is free: there’s no oppressive political bloc telling you how to run your life every minute of every day. There’s room to spare for its more than 80 million transhuman inhabitants, all of whom can express themselves as they see fit. There are major centers of learning for those who want to expand their mind, pharmaceuticals for the same, employment opportunities, space to hide, space to party, and space to live and love.

Saturn’s famous wide, thin rings stretch from 7,000 km above the top of its clouds to nearly 80,000 km. More than 60 moons and moonlets orbit Saturn, including Titan, the only satellite in the Solar System with a thick natural atmosphere.

The Ringers

Saturn’s rings are the primary source of water in the system and a great place to go to be alone and contemplate the beauty of the universe. Ringers forego habs and use vacuum-tolerant morphs to live here, going months without seeing anyone else. Some ringers are here to hide, but most are just solitary; they look out for each other and protect each other’s privacy.

Gas Mining

Mining the clouds is a major business. Contractors operate automated skimmers or navigate harvester aerostats to extract methane and ammonia from the top of the atmosphere. Deeper operations dip into Saturn’s depths to return with volatiles and helium-3. Orbital refineries run by hypercorps like Volkov process the gases and ship them to habitats around the system.

Saturnian Settlements

Saturn’s diversity expresses itself in many ways. The range of transhumans and cultures here is as beautiful as our planet’s rings.

Bright (Tethys)

What happens when you stick genius-level egos together in a single hab, provide for their basic needs, and turn them loose on whatever strikes their fancy? You get Bright, a joint hypercorp experiment in commodifying intelligence. Well, it was a joint project until Acumenic pulled a hostile takeover, even pushing Cognite’s project lead out an airlock. Now Acumenic is struggling to assert control over the station. At least one part of the habitat has been seized by a group of self-made sociopaths and closed off to outsiders. Bright is housed on a work-in-progress Hamilton cylinder constructed from Tethys’ moon Telesto.

Kronos Cluster

Kronos started as an Extropian and anarchist settlement made of tin-can modules and grew to the bursting point after the Fall, when it accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees from Earth. The original settlers found themselves at odds with newly-formed criminal syndicates, and Kronos became a hotbed of the quasi-legal and morally questionable.

Things deteriorated, and the Extropians formed the Kronos Port Authority (KPA), which brought in Ultimate mercenaries to enforce their rules. The Ultimates took over the KPA, and have now forced a detente across the station.

Kronos is now a patchwork of armed neighborhoods. Tourists are drawn to the vices offered, and the KPA makes bank on offering them protective services. The KPA runs a business license protection racket to keep the gangs from getting out of hand. The anarchists keep to themselves, but sometimes conflicts flare up with neighboring groups.

MeatHab

When post-Fall postmodernism is no longer enough, artists create projects like Turn Yourself Into a Giant Mass of Space Meat for Art! MeatHab is a living habitat made primarily of vat-grown bacon. Originally intended to be temporary, it attracted a following of anarchists, scum, researchers, and weirdos that squatted the station to bask in the oddness of its veinous, skin-covered corridors. It has even spawned its own religious cult, the Acolytes of Living Meat. By all indications, the mysterious original designer is still present, occasionally playing pranks on its inhabitants.

Pandora

Saturn’s outermost shepherd moon is also one of the most studied and trafficked places in the Solar System. The site of the first discovered pandora gate, Pandora has a single major settlement: Gateway. Run by the Gatekeeper Corporation, once a subsidiary of the Commonwealth of Titan but now autonomous, Gateway is the major hub between here and there. Almost every hypercorp and government with any influence has representation here. This mix makes the station a steaming cauldron of cultures, ideologies, hopes, dreams, and ruthless ambitions.

The scum barge Lost in Neverwhere is an excellent supply point for sentinels who need to acquire discrete items. It maintains a semi-permanent orbit around the moonlet, moving only when station security gets sick of their antics.

Phelan’s Recourse

Known colloquially as Phelan’s, this scum flotilla is a waystation between Saturnian civilization and the wilderness beyond; a constant, free-wheeling party where you’re just as likely to find yourself blasted out an airlock as you are chasing a high with some of the finest Fall refugees you’ll ever meet. While Phelan’s is a fine place to pick up some of the greatest mind-altering substances you can ingest, its best export is Phelan’s Ma, hands-down the best whiskey in the galaxy unless you happen to have a bottle of 21-year-old PortWood Balvenie. Phelan’s swarm cycles between Saturn’s moons, making it an excellent place to score intel and make connections.

Profunda (Enceladus)

Profunda is the largest settlement on Enceladus and famous across the system. On-station government is nearly nonexistent; business is conducted with Extropian legal contracts. The Profunda Corporation is the key interest in mining and refining operations, but it is not the only game in town. Profunda, however, is best known for their premier genetic designers and morph artists. They create everything from custom morphs to neogenetic and chimeric creatures like the winged smart cats popular around the Saturn system. Profunda’s Glitter Bloc dominates the market in luxury morph models, providing sleeves to some of the most notorious metacelebrities and socialites.

Salah

Salah was conceived by the Al Thani family of Qatar, who heavily financed various efforts to expand into space. Originally intended as a grandiose display of wealth and power, Salah is now seen by many Muslims as an opportunity to bring the ummah together again and give them a place of their own to call home. However, the Al Thani family is working hard to open Salah to Consortium hypercorps, offering them a foothold in the outer system. Already their designs have run counter to the community’s wishes.

Salah is a place of faith and tolerance. While many of us follow the teachings of the Prophet, a great many Hindus, some Christians, and some Jewish refugees have been given quarter here. Salah was designed to inspire. Vast parks and green spaces combine with architecture meant to emulate everything from the Hagia Sophia to the Al Haram to Canterbury Cathedral. It is hard not to stand within Salah and feel awe.

Twelve Commons (Epimetheus and Janus)

Twelve Commons is a neighborhood of habitats that reside on or near the co-orbital path of the moonlets Epimetheus and Janus. There are now many more than twelve of the original anarchist collectives that formed Twelve Commons. The entire settlements occupies a cloud spread out over 20,000 kilometers. It’s a refuge for scientists, artists, engineers, and writers.

Notable communities include the Do-It-Yourself Shipyards, where the technicians and automated construction facilities delight in taking your ship design from plans to reality; Janus Commons, a 900,000-person habitat full of research labs and experimental theater productions; Long Haul, a collective devoted to liberating infugees and indentures and giving them new morphs; and Small Majesties, a collective of nano-artists.

Titan

Posted by: Magnus Ming, Titan Autonomous University

As transhumanity’s fate approached, scientists settled on Titan to study its unique lakes and rivers of liquid methane. Soon they settled the moon with the dream of creating a place where all transhumans could live free together. The Titanian Commonwealth, home to 60 million transhumans, is the realization of that dream.

Saturn’s largest moon is shrouded in a permanent orange atmospheric haze, hellishly cold (averaging −180 °C), and whipped by winds produced by tidal forces four times stronger than those influencing Earth’s climate. On its face, it appears even less hospitable than the airless balls of ice and rock comprising every world between Titan and Mars. The meager sunlight reaching its surface is insufficient to grow any but the hardiest plants, the mostly nitrogen atmosphere is dangerously toxic, and the surface is dotted with lakes and seas of liquid methane. In spite of all this, abundant hydrocarbons, a thick atmosphere, and diverse chemistry make Titan one of the few worlds in the system where colonists may rely entirely on local resources. Titan’s low gravity (0.138 g) makes it easy to launch ships from the surface with mass drivers or catapults.

Aarhus

Aarhus is a European college town transplanted to three kilometer-wide hab domes on the shores of a serene lake of liquid hydrocarbons. 20% of Aarhus’s population is students, many of them from off-world (and outside the Saturnian system), attending one of its twelve institutes of higher learning. The largest is Titan Autonomous University, followed by the Titan Technical Institute, both housed under the cleverly-named University City dome. In the tradition of college towns since the middle ages, students and faculty are proudly political, enjoy drinking, and partake in friendly school rivalries.

New Quebec

Titan’s third-largest city is both charming and dangerous. It’s a wonderful place to spend a holiday, and its old-Canadian-inspired architecture, gaming facilities, and four-star restaurants encourage tourism. It’s also the Commonwealth’s main hub of criminal activity, with gangs fighting for control and a police force that seems woefully unequipped.

Most visitors to New Quebec are perfectly safe. If, however, you were looking for underworld connections on Titan, needed some extra muscle, or wanted to get your grubby little paws on something iffy, then New Quebec is your best bet.

Nyhavn

The Commonwealth’s capital and largest city is Nyhavn, a series of four vast domes, skyward-pointing spires, and a spiderweb of tunnels bored into Titan’s crust. It’s the commercial, cultural, and industrial hub of Titan (and perhaps the Saturnian system).

Nyhavn’s four main domes (Great Nyhavn, Telemark City, Old Nyhavn, and New København) provide housing, recreation, education, and services for the city’s residents. Vast parks merge seamlessly with microcorp offices, industrial facilities, rail lines, and educational institutions. Skyport Nyhavn is Titan’s busiest spaceport, offering flights anywhere in the Solar System. Because the city is situated on Titan’s equator, a space elevator is under construction on Mt. Kristiansund just south of the domes.

Commonwealth Hub

The Hub floats in geosynchronous orbit over Nyhavn. It is Titan’s primary spaceport, with a massive fleet of orbital landers to shuttle goods and people down to the surface. A recent shutdown of the port’s activities was blamed on improper imlementation of a software update, but rumors point to some sort of contained outbreak.