The System Fringe

Posted by: Jarvis Tryscuz, Firewall Sentinel

For most of transhumanity, the fringe is shorthand for “shit you wouldn’t want your mother to know about.” That’s partially true. There’s plenty of criminal or amoral shit going down in those big open spaces between pockets of civilization. There’s also plenty of communities of hard-working folks who just want to be left the hell alone.

Everything interesting happens in the dark. It’s very dark out there.

The Inner Fringe

More than 10,000 asteroids tumble around inside Mars’s orbit, and a full tenth of them are over a kilometer in diameter, which means they can house a bubble, cylinder, or beehive habitat. You don’t have to flee rimward to hide; there are plenty of places sunward the Consortium won’t go or simply doesn’t know about.

Economic exploitation of these asteroids isn’t as lucrative as mining the Main Belt. Many of them are in eccentric orbits that put them far from the ecliptic. There are still quite a few bodies in the inner system that haven’t been properly mapped or detected. Inner-fringe settlements range from paranoid to hedonistic to downright criminal.

Impian

Impian (“Dream” in Malay) was once 1086 Ganymed, the largest of the Amor asteroids and the first settled and mined. It asserted its independence after the Fall, but was soon infiltrated by the Shui Fong triad. The Shui Fong kept Impian’s simulspace-coding and software development hypercorps intact, running the station as a center of “safe vice for a price.”

Sisyphus

1866 Sisyphus is a binary asteroid orbiting between 0.9 and 2 AU. It’s the home of the largest Zrbny Limited waystation in the inner system. It was built entirely by automated manufacturing robots after the corporation mysteriously went into lockdown and terminated all personnel. Zrbny’s own paper trail runs out quickly. With no signs of transhuman involvement, it’s not clear who’s pulling the strings on Sisyphus and why.

PEX

The Planetary Stock Exchange lives on the creatively-named PEX station. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more secure habitat in the inner system. It accounts for a major portion of mesh traffic during peak trading hours as suits from across the system wheel and deal. Oversight’s central offices are here.

The habitat itself is appropriately luxurious; visitors and the handful of permanent residents can buy nearly any experience they want. The hab’s halls are carpeted and ostentatious displays of money and power are the rule of the day. The finest French restaurant in the Solar System, La Petite Pigeon, is on PEX’s second-highest floor. I can only speculate how they source their pâté.

Despite the tight security, someone released a biowar agent here that caused multiple traders to suicide or chew their own arms off in AF 8.

The Outer Fringe

There are no cities here. There are no luxury hotels, no gourmet restaurants, and no Consortium cops. From here, Uranus looks downright cosmopolitan.

If you’re this far out, you’re either looking for privacy, doing research, trying your hand at prospecting, or up to no good. When brinkers in the fringe meet hypercorps representatives, we suspect something untoward is going on. Watch your step out here.

Communities this far out are very closely knit, and any outsiders are threats. The distances between outer-fringe settlements are hard to grasp, especially for inner-system inhabitants used to shuttling around the Consortium. Getting from Neptune to Pluto is a logistical (and economic) nightmare if you aren’t egocasting in.

The Dogs

This small cluster of tiny centaur asteroids are each in the process of being transformed into weapons platforms by automated bots and swarms. The entity behind this project is known only as the Artifex. Their intentions remain unclear. We have yet to ascertain if this is an art project, a proof of concept, or something more sinister.

Mortusae

Saturn lacks Trojan asteroids due to the influence of Jupiter, which disrupts the long-term stability of the Lagrange points. A small asteroid temporarily orbiting at the Sol-Saturn L4 has been occupied by an exhuman group identified as the Empusae. Composed of both sublime and predator exhumans (and possibly others), they have an avowed goal of enslaving transhumanity. This particular nest seems to have hostile intentions for Saturnian habitats.

New Sarpalius

This 65-kilometer centaur asteroid was home to a pre-Fall mining operation. When the company' leadership was destroyed during the Fall, the Algerian workers launched a strike against local management that turned into a full revolt. For years the habitat ran along anarchist lines under the name Sanctuary. Just a few months ago, however, a Consortium-backed coup seized control. Autonomists are divided on how to respond, as the coup seems to have strong local support, though some residents claim there was a Consortium conspiracy to slowly seed the colony with supporters over a course of years.

ITN Cyclers

ITN Cyclers are large ships, swarms, or habitats that lumber along the Interplanetary Transport Network. This predetermined route is a system of gravity assists, quick burn maneuvers, and the occasional aerobrake that allows a vessel to travel the Solar System using very little fuel. It’s been plotted out to several thousand years, and most self-sufficient ITN Cyclers carry enough fuel to last at least a thousand before they need a top-up.

Conch

The Conch started its life as a refugee ship, when Brazilian and Panamanian families escaped the Fall. The social order on the ship quickly devolved as various groups of refugees battled each other for the limited resources, prime space, and political power.

Then things got strange. The hyperelite Lhagva family purchased the ship, replaced the entire crew, and transferred three family members there. These three brothers — Bold, Batkhuu, and Battulga — were wanted for various white-collar crimes in the inner system and were put into voluntary exile to avoid embarrassment.

The brothers quickly insinuated themselves among the various social groups and started treating the Conch like their own private social experiment. Those who refuse to conform or fall out of the brothers’ favor find themselves shoved out the nearest airlock.

The Kuiper Belt & Oort Cloud

The K-Belt and Oort Cloud are leftovers from the formation of the Solar System: pieces of debris that never bumbled together to form a proper planet. Out here all you’ll find are iceteroids that haven't been convinced to become comets yet and the occasional frozen dwarf planet. Life this far out is either a brinker’s paradise or a punishment posting.

The Kuiper Belt extends from 30 to 55 AU. There are a few scattered settlements in the K-Belt; it’s a combination of Old West homesteading and living like some filthy medieval hermit. The even less-dense Oort Cloud starts around 2,000 AU and extends to interstellar space. No one really lives there. The furthest we've gotten a probe so far is around 30,000 AU.

Eris

Eris lies 55 AU beyond the sun, and this speck has seen a disproportionate amount of action for a body barely able to maintain hydrostatic equilibrium. It’s made of rock, water, and methane ice. its tiny moon, Dysnomia, is an unremarkable captured chunk of rock. What Eris does have is the Discord Gate, and the battles for control of the gate have turned the surface of this tiny shithole into a war-scarred wasteland.

The Go-nin Group controls Eris and its only settlement, Torii, home to approximately 20,000 transhumans. Torii is a beehive carved deep into Eris, in part because the gate location physically sunk when Go-nin somehow destroyed it, before later rebuilding itself. Torii is Eris’s only spaceport; unauthorized ships coming within 500 km are terminated.

Dysnomia houses Pharos, an Ultimate base armed to the teeth with combat morphs, ships, weapons batteries, and even nuclear and antimatter weapons. The Ultimates guard over Torii and help defend against anarchists and exhumans.

Markov

Markov is one of the best-kept secrets in the Solar System. It’s somewhere in the outer fringe or Kuiper Belt, but the Argonauts do their best to keep its location hidden. Markov is a lab for cutting-edge Argonaut research: experiments in propulsion, quantum mechanics, biomechanics, cognitive science, and Lorentzian manifolds.

Markov houses the Library, the Argonauts’s main data backup, as well as the Medean Apollo project, a predictive analytics initiative utilizing cutting-edge AIs examining enormous amounts of data. Most of Markov’s inhabitants are infomorphs and AGIs; biomorphs customized for the habitat’s thermal-dissipating perfluorocarbon atmosphere can survive there.

Pluto and Charon

The largest and best-known Kuiper-Belt object (KBO), currently about 48 AU from the sun, the first of its kind explored by humanity prior to the Fall. Its rocky core is surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of water and methane ice. Liquid occasionally seeps to the surface as the gravitational tug of its sister binary object, Charon, reshapes Pluto.

There are no major settlements on Pluto or Charon except for tiny mining outfits and brinker communities. The Tulihänd station, a cluster hab balanced between the two bodies, oversees the largest mining operation in the remote rim. Tulihänd runs comet-capture operations and manufactures and controls the massive crawlers that strip smaller KBOs; materials harvested are returned to Tulihänd’s refineries before they’re flung back to inner-system buyers.

Tulihänd itself is a fortress. Shipments in and out are popular targets for pirates, so information about mining and refining operations are closely guarded secrets.

Haumea

Haumea tumbles through an eccentric orbit anywhere from 35 to 50 AU. Haumea’s surface is marred by a gigantic red crater from an impact early in its life; the only settlement on the mineral-and-volatile-poor rock is a mining camp on the crater’s rim. This camp is the major base for the Mafeng gang, the largest and best-equipped band of pirates and thugs in the K-Belt.

Makemake

Makemake orbits between 38 and 51 AU, and its composition suggests it is a captured piece of interstellar debris. It’s about two-thirds the size of Pluto and has at least one moonlet. Official records say Makemake is uninhabited except for a few prospectors. Unconfirmed reports suggest that ships destined for Makemake are far better armed and equipped than any prospecting vessel should be.

Tyche

Tyche is a cold Jupiter in a highly eccentric, slightly inclined orbit with a perihelion of about 220 AU and an aphelion of 1200 AU. Discovered by analyzing mathematical anomalies, Tyche’s existence was confirmed in the early 21st century. It’s about ten times the mass of Earth but only four times the diameter, making it incredibly dense. That’s all we know about the ninth planet. The Argonauts have sent probes to Tyche, but they won’t arrive for another 20 years.