Habitat Access

How you gain entry to a habitat and what screening you’re likely to undergo depends upon how you arrive. Some habitats are close to other settlements, while others are physically isolated by the vast, empty distances of interplanetary space. Habitats in dense planetary systems receive most of their visitors via conventional space travel. Immigration and customs infrastructure is geared toward receiving visitors via their spaceport, and the processing of arrivals is analogous to a 21st-century airport. Isolated habitats, on the other hand, tend to receive almost all of their visitors via egocast.

Egocasting

Shuttlecraft using a variety of propulsion systems make regular trips between habitats, planetary surfaces, and moons. But for any trip longer than 1.5 million kilometers — the distance a fusion drive craft can cover in about a day — most people egocast.

Egocasting is transhumanity’s most advanced personal transportation technology, though only your ego actually travels. Egocasting combines uploading and quantum farcasting to securely transfer your mind over interplanetary distances. This can be an active infomorph, an inactive backup, or even an upload transferred from your conscious mind.

Though egocasting occurs at the speed of light, times vary drastically with distance. Egocasting within a cluster or planetary system is usually just a matter of minutes. Egocasting from the sun to the Kuiper Belt, however, takes between 40 and 70 hours, and so egocasting all of the way across the Solar System can take even longer.

Most egocasting is handled via legitimate farcasting services, often operated by the habitat’s government. If you are uploading from a morph, it may be sold, leased, or stored with a body bank service. Most people sell their morph, trading it in for a new sleeve at their destination. Storage/leasing is primarily reserved to the rich, people returning quickly, or people with a particular attachment to their morph (sometimes because it is their original).

Egocaster Security

Beaming yourself across interplanetary space is a mature technology and usually works seamlessly. Because egocasting uses quantum farcasters, there is no danger of radio interference cooking the signal and causing data loss. Due to concerns over protecting egos, farcaster services usually engage strict security practices; breaches are uncommon.

However, there are risks involved. If the farcaster service at either end is not trusted or the networks are privately controlled or compromised, your ego is at their mercy. Most hypercorps consider meddling with a transmitted ego to be a serious breach of etiquette, whereas autonomist types would find it unthinkably repressive. However, political extremists and criminal organizations in control of egocasters suffer from fewer restraints.

Electronic Arrivals

Once an ego arrives at the destination receiver, it can be archived, run as an infomorph, or resleeved as normal. Arrivals by egocast are sometimes interviewed by habitat authorities in a simulspace before resleeving. Depending on the habitat’s attitude toward civil rights, this process can be relatively reasonable or quite invasive. A minimal entry inspection includes an ID check, a brief interview with a customs AI, and a review of the specs of the morph into which the arriving ego plans to resleeve. Habitats with draconian immigration measures may use harsh psychosurgery interrogation techniques on suspect infomorphs. Egos have little recourse to avoid this treatment — station authorities can simply file them away in cold storage if they choose — so it is wise to investigate customs procedures before you send yourself over.

Because many people, particularly autonomists and brinkers, don’t appreciate this kind of reception, various farcasting services have stepped in to provide pre-customs resleeving for those traveling to habitats with suspect screening methods. For often-exorbitant fees, the traveler egocasts into an extraterritorial substation close to their intended destination, resleeves there, and then travels to their destination by ship or shuttle.

Physical Arrivals

Physical travel is more common over short distances. However, bioconservatives or people seeking to travel without leaving a trail may prefer long-distance ships over egocasting.

Arrivals by spacecraft undergo, at minimum, an ego ID check, scans to detect pathogens, hostile nanobots, explosives, or radiation, and an inspection of their personal effects. Some habitats go farther, including rigorous secondary screenings using scout nanoswarms, scans of all electronic systems for malware, and/or aggressive interrogation of a fork of the subject. Even autonomist enclaves enforce automated scans for anything that might pose a danger to the habitat or any signs of hypercorp saboteur efforts.

Restricted goods vary according to local legalities. Many habitats, particularly those controlled by autonomist or criminal factions, allow personal weaponry as long as its nothing you can use to blow a hole in the structure or indiscriminately kill dozens of people. Others, notably the Jovian Republic and hypercorp stations, disallow lethal weapons of all kinds, except for people who have acquired special permits and authorization (sometimes available by bribing the right people or pulling favors with rep). Nonlethal weapons are generally allowed. Other restricted items may include nanofabricators, nanoswarms, malware and hacker software, drugs and narcoalgorithms, certain types of XP recordings, covert operations tools, and so on. Certain types of morphs may also be restricted, such as reapers, furies, or uplifts.

Certain habitats may insist that visitors — or at least the ones they don’t like the looks of — submit to specific forms of monitoring or surveillance for the duration of their stay. This might include taggant nanoswarms, hosting a police AI in your mesh inserts, or even physical tailing by an armed security drone. Other stations will require that their visitors leave an inactive fork as a form of collateral at the door — in case they commit a crime, the fork can be interrogated.

Finally, though rare, some habitats go so far as to charge all visitors an “air tax” — a fee for using the station’s publicly available resources while they are present. This is generally only common in isolated habitats with strained resources and is considered especially obnoxious by most autonomists.

Habitat Infiltration

Getting onto or around a habitat without authorization is not easy, but for the determined many options abound.

Darknets

Various illegal darkcast services run by crime syndicates sometimes offer an alternative method of egocasting in. Darkcast services are quite expensive, however, and you are at the mercy of the operators. They have their own reputations to maintain, but if one group has a monopoly on darkcasting into a habitat, problems sometimes develop. However, these providers often offer black-market resleeving services, including restricted morphs and ware, as well as fake ID. In rare cases, political factions (usually autonomist cells) or even hypercorps might operate their own darkcast systems; accessing these services requires being in-the-know, having a good rep, and/or greasing the right palms.

Sneaking In

Darkcasting isn’t always an option. For those who don’t want to test the reliability of their fake IDs or who don’t want to put their egos in the care of habitat customs, the next option is to try sneaking into the station. For stations on planets or moons, this is often not very difficult. Major dome and warren settlements on Mars, Luna, and Titan are used to traffic around the exterior of their habitats. Some don’t even restrict entrance. Others feature local crime cartels who have already established underground tunnels or hacked airlocks in order to move contraband and people. More isolated outposts, however, are likely to take an interest in strangers who drive up and start messing around outside their walls. With some preparation and determination, however, it is sometimes possible to sneak up while evading sensor detection.

Habitats in space are surrounded by thousands of kilometers of emptiness — a moat of vacuum that is perilous to cross. Approaching without detection is quite a challenge, as most keep an eye on their immediate environs with radar and wide-field telescopes in both visible and infrared to spot approaching craft by their radar signature, infrared heat emissions, or the thrusting and braking of their drives. The latter is especially difficult, as any momentum that carries a ship toward a habitat must be arrested if the ship plans to stop there — and this means using drives that are a dead giveaway. For colonies on asteroids, the asteroid itself can sometimes be used to block line of sight for an approaching ship, though many stations deploy satellites that keep an eye on this angle as well.

Ultimately, all a potential interloper needs to do is to get close enough to the habitat to cross the void using an EVA sled or thruster pack. This can be accomplished by passing in the vicinity of the station and dropping the infiltrators off, by finding something nearby the station to hide a ship’s deceleration behind, or by catching a lift some other way.

An easier option, perhaps, is to take a ship that docks at the habitat, either legitimately or as a ruse, and then use the opportunity to sneak into space and over to the habitat. For colonies that deploy harvester drones, another possibility is to intercept one of these bots and use it catch a lift back to the station’s drone bay.

Aerostats and bathyscaphes are somewhat easier to approach. Any number of aircraft can be used to sneak up on an aerostat — microlights and balloons being particularly difficult to detect. There is also the option of skydiving down from an aircraft passing overhead — or even falling from space in a high-dive suit. Bathyscaphes, on the other hand, require swimming or using a vehicle that doesn’t get noticed by the station’s radar and sonar.

Criminal and smuggler outfits rely heavily on bribery or otherwise compromised security to gain access. Forged credentials are also relied upon, as is simply physically transporting backups or infomorphs on storage media through security and then re-instancing or resleeving them within.

Exterior Access

Once at the habitat’s exterior, an entrance can be found or created. This usually entails hacking an airlock. Cutting or blasting one’s way inside is also an option, though this draws attention with noisy things like decompression and explosions. Careful research of a station’s design might pinpoint spots where breaching the exterior does not trigger alarms. Beehives or warren habitats, for example, might have unused or forgotten tunnels that lead to interior airlocks.

Lingering too long on a habitat exterior may attract attention. Exteriors are typically equipped with security cameras and infrared sensors overwatched by security AIs. Particularly secure or paranoid stations may have seismic sensors built into the hull or feature regular sentry bot patrols. Workers and maintenance bots on a hab’s exterior, though not normally armed or trained as security guards, will report suspicious visitors. In the Jovian system, almost all exterior work is done by teleoperated bots due to extreme radiation. In other outer system habs, such as big clusters like Locus, spacewalking is very common simply as a means of getting around, so being spotted is much more likely — though, depending upon the situation, the observer might not even bother reporting your presence to anyone.