On the Lack of New Wormholes

An excerpt from a lecture on Interstellar Travel 101 by professor Rchel Coligera of the University of Dawson Sphere, 3002 PX.

Now I can see that most of you have turned in your pre-course surveys and there was one question that just kept appearing. “Why aren’t we covering wormholes?” Well, I can answer that quickly: Wormholes are obsolete, expensive, and slow.

Yes, slow, I spoke correctly.

”How can that be?” You ask? Well that’s a bit more complicated.

How many of you are from Carrack? Okay, seven of you, good. How about Algernon? Eight, nice. Persephone? Eleven, really? Well, we’ve got quite a few relativist students, that’s no surprise for Interstellar Travel 101.

What would you say if I told you that under the Federation none of you would have left your home system?

At the Federation’s height it’s estimated that less than one in one hundred star systems were within a year’s travel of a wormhole. And most ships took close to a year to reach a wormhole, even the fastest ships of the Federation era took a month to travel from an inhabitable planet to the Oort Cloud where wormholes could be safely emplaced. Travel from systems without wormholes often took decades. You interstellar students are aware that by the time you return home your siblings and classmates will be middle-aged grandparents, unless they were fortunate enough to have access to leukosynths. But if you’d taken a wormhole to Alpha Centauri, they’d be long dead.

Sure, we could combine modern singularity drives with wormhole travel, but why would we? The wormhole network is gone, with a few rare exceptions. And it would be far too expensive to try and rebuild it.

You might have heard that the micro-singularities powering a 1,000-hydro-ton liner consumed a small planetoid, but the mass consumed to make transversable wormholes is measured in stars. We can only guess how many brown dwarfs were sucked up into Proxima Centauri’s StarForge. Just one brown dwarf could support a population of billions, as many peripheral polities have discovered after obtaining singularity drives, or build a fleet of thousands.

Due to this expense the StarForge took the better part of a century to produce the first traversable wormhole. Even in the Federation’s final century we only have records of four, maybe five new wormholes opening. This was one reason why 90% of all wormholes connected to the Alpha Centauri system, and collapsed when Sol went nova.

So, the better question is, why did the Federation bother with wormholes at all? Why didn’t they just build stellar swarms like the one you’re all sitting inside? Two words: Dispersal and security.

The Core Worlds were colonized by refugees from Sol after the Destroyers scrubbed the system of life. When the Federation formed they knew that the only way they could survive as a clade was to keep a low profile, thus they adopted a policy of spreading parahumanity thin across the stars. Since the Destroyers were apparently destroyed, the university has detected five other stellar swarms in the past two centuries, including around Alpha Centauri B, Tau Ceti, and Epsilon Eridani; the Federation’s Core Worlds.

As for the second point, the Federation could not tolerate competition. You might have heard of a “Pax Federaci” but I’m going to tell you right now that entire concept is revisionist bullshit. The university’s archaeological expeditions have uncovered sizable evidence that “deportations” to Outworlds were far more common than the records would indicate. Helped, naturally, by the Federation’s policy of erasing all evidence of the deported’s existence in the name of “memetic containment.” We have even discovered a few Outworlds that appear to have started as fully Federated colonies, only to be bombed back to the Stone Age later on.

So, yeah, we might be islands in space and time separated by years, but we’re more connected than ever.

Terraforming Biodiversity

The seedships that arrived at Alpha Centauri had limited space on board for genetic samples, with parahuman and uplift DNA given the highest priority. The unfortunate result being that the vast majority of Old Terra’s rich biodiversity died with that planet, leaving Secland and later terraformed worlds an extremely limited gene pool to work with. 

During the terraforming process scientists struggled to fill in the niches left open by a gene bank weighed heavily towards domesticated and laboratory test animals. The possibility of making “downlifted” versions of the uplifted species was proposed but almost universally rejected by the uplifts in question. Instead, the Bureau of Ecosystem Management offered jobs to uplifts filling the ecological roles of their progenitors. This strategy worked surprisingly well, especially with apex predators such as dolphins.

Another approach was to modify the animals they did have using the non-human genes that had been incorporated into parahuman genomes. For instance Secland “bats” are actually heavily modified mice while the procyon is a fox given hand-like paws and a ringed tail.

Late in the terraforming process scientists made a breakthrough that would simplify later efforts. Large complexes of genes that could be activated or deactivated with specific epigenetic triggers were added to the genomes of many species that could produce massive physiological changes in later generations. That way a single breeding colony of ultra-ferrets could give birth to 20-centimeter long mini-ferrets, semi-aquatic ferr-otters, or two-meter mega wolverines as the ecosystem needed.

List of source species:

Mammals:

Cat (Felis catus)

Cattle (Bos taurus)

Dog (Canis lupus familiaris)

Ferret (Mustela furo)

Red fox (Vulpes vulpes)

House mouse (Mus musculus)

European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus)

Sheep (Ovis aries)

Birds:

Budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus)

Canary (Serinus canaria)

Chicken (Gallus domesticus)

Rock dove (Columba livia)

Zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata)

Reptiles:

Green anole (Anolis carolinensis)

Spectacled caiman (Caiman crocodilus)

Fish:

Goldfish (Carassius auratus)

Zebrafish (Danio rerio)

Amphibians:

African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis)

Axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum)

Bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana)

Tiger salamander (Ambystoma tigrinum)

Arthropods:

Fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster)

House cricket (Acheta domesticus)

Yellow mealworm beetle (Tenebrio molitor)

Pirate Kingdoms

Following the breakup of the Federation interstellar states were extremely rare. Without the wormhole network it took decades to reach even the nearest neighboring stars, the logistics of maintaining political cohesion over such distances were nigh-impossible even for systems capable of building conversion drives and the later bubble drives.

However, during the second exodus many of the fleets leaving the core worlds were unable to find new homes, frontier colonies with infrastructure already stretched by severed supply lines weren’t interested in taking in millions of new refugees. A lot of these fleets wound up wandering the stars in perpetuity.

While onboard recycling systems could keep the passengers alive for centuries, they did eventually need resupply from star systems. Some fleets were able to find uninhabited systems they could colonize but most of the easily settled stars had already been claimed by the time of the fall. The rest wound up drifting from one star to another, trading, begging, and, increasingly, stealing supplies that they needed.

As they gathered supplies these fleets grew and built larger and larger weapons. As these fleets settled into established patterns they started to form agreements with the governments in the systems they visited. The most common being an agreement not to pillage a polity, in exchange for resources.

Time passed, and these agreements became more complex. Pacts to defend one polity from attack by another, or to attack another polity, migration treaties, oaths of fealty…

When some advanced systems began to reach out to the stars they found few polities willing to join their “new Federation,” instead discovering that many of them had formed a deal with what these would-be successor states considered no better than pirates. They labeled these loose organizations many things: “Nomadic coalitions,” “protection rackets,” “fleet protectorates,” etc. But one name in particular found staying power:

Pirate Kingdoms.

These “kingdoms” typically are far from centralized states and most are not hereditary monarchies. In fact most are composed of several polities of various different governments. A star system usually has multiple inhabited planets or megastructures and hundreds of smaller habitats, and each one tends to have a separate government if not several. A fleet passing through a system might lay claim to fealty from some or all of these polities, and if another fleet passes through the system those same polities may also give them fealty.

Within a fleet each ship has a government led by its captain, who may be elected, hereditary, or promoted up the ranks. In theory each captain owes fealty to the captain of the largest ship in the fleet, generically known as the “admiral,” but affiliations between ships tend to be loose at best. Open warfare between ships in a fleet is rare, but generally happens during the gulf between stars so as to project solidarity towards client states. The same courtesy does not apply to other fleets.

Preskaŭimperio

The English name “parahuman” was invented by human political activists, in the Esperanto they learned from their corporate creators parahumanity called themselves “preskaŭhomoj”, meaning “almost humans.” Following the revolution many newly independent parahumans instead chose to call themselves “preterhomoj” (beyond humans), a term that has carried over in some form into most modern preterhoma languages.

While Esperanto is officially a dead language in the modern Federation it’s fairly common for people to know a smattering, much like Latin or Ancient Greek on 20th century Terra. The Federation’s official name is actually in Esperanto: La Federacio de Preterhomaro. As do many of the names used by its detractors.

The Collapse

In the 25th century PX Centauran astronomers observed a notable dimming in the light from the long-abandoned Sol. When an expedition was dispatched to investigate they confirmed the Federation’s worst fears, that the Destroyers were constructing a Dyson Sphere in the ruins of their destroyed home. The expedition was quickly discovered and intercepted by the machines, but they managed to fire off a weapon they’d brought directly from the Star Forge’s most hidden labs, a strangelet bomb. The mass of strange matter the device unleashed into Sol triggered a coronal mass ejection sufficient to fry the remnants of the planetary system, reducing the unfinished Sphere to its’ constituent atoms.

Unfortunately, the blast front, and the strangelets it carried, did not stop at the heliosphere. As soon as the QComm warning reached Alpha Centauri the Federation began planning to evacuate the Core Worlds. The next four years saw a mad dash through the star gates for the far reaches of the empire, first the elites attempting to secure their own corners of the wreckage, then the greater population once the news leaked. Small wars broke out in the center of galactic civilization between those attempting to escape the radiation by burrowing deep within planetoids, and those who sought to dismantle them for ship materials.

When the wavefront came within one AU of the central gate nexus on the edge of the Alpha Centauri system ships were still streaming through, but the Federal Guard had their orders and weren’t going to wait. The wormholes that had enabled Alpha Centauri to spread its imperium to the stars could just as easily carry solar ejections as ships, so to save parahumanity the Federation broke its own backbone. Every wormhole-connected system saw a planet-cracking flash in their skies, but the great distance between gates and stars mandated by the Federation spared the bulk of their populations.

The once unrivaled imperium of the Federation of Parahuman Species is no more. Where once there was a united empire there are now a dozen pretenders reaching desperately through the fragmented remnants of the gate network, and hundreds more stars that feel no fealty to anyone.

But all is not gloom and despair. In the centuries since the Federation’s fall cultures and peoples they once stifled have flourished. Quarantined Outworlds build crude chemical rockets to claim their ancestral birthright. Posthumans in their hidden lairs contemplate mysteries unfathomable to mere mortals. And a grainy compressed video allegedly from the Solar expedition gives hope not thought possible for millennia.

Destroyer vessels exploding, several minutes before the radiation wavefront reached them.

Project Paladin

After the nova of the 25th century the Federation’s grasp over the outlying systems was severely weakened. With interstellar travel immensely more difficult without the majority of the stargate network, local governments frequently found themselves fending for themselves. Planets and stars isolated, vulnerable to predation by pirate clans, renegade posthumans, and even other federally recognized governments, desperate for resources.

The ambitious system executor Ronkall Argentum revived the long-discarded idea of a small corps of posthuman enforcers of the peace, with an additional variation. Project Paladin would package a set of augmentations suitable for empowering paragons of Federal virtue into easily portable modular kits that would fit onto a small starship, along with VR suites specially designed for the memetic priming of these champions. Rather than attempting to transport a peacekeeping force or nakedly extort tribute with ortillery, they could convert locals into ambassadors of a greater power with the means to win over hearts and minds through shock and awe.

In several systems it proved quite successful, however, in the Tiere planetary system things went somewhat awry…

Eridani’s Full Circle

In sharp contrast to the 500-year cold war on Secland and feudal caste system on Schwarzwelt, Epsilon Eridani seems to have been remarkably unstable during the Long Silence. Yet, of the three core systems Eridani also seems to have changed the least since colonization.

When the Ceres Directorate seedship first arrived and began bioprinting colonists the crew promptly declared themselves the “board of directors” and presented the colonists with a bill for their creation that they would spend the whole of their lives paying off. When the colonists’ debts were passed on to their children the board saddled them with additional debts for education, equipment, housing, childcare… The third generation were the ones who finally had enough and killed the board, declaring themselves the Eridani Cooperative. However a small group within the Co-op bought the shares of many struggling workers for a pittance (in some cases a bottle of liquor) and consolidated their power as a new board of directors. This new board would respond to complaints of disenfranchisement by repeating splitting shares and selling only enough to maintain their majority stake, often buying them back for a profit later. However, the lower ranks of their security forces often had the fewest shares and eventually a charismatic sergeant assassinated the CEO and forced the remaining board members to give their shares to his faction. Thus was the Eridani Directorate born. The next revolution came shortly after re-contact. Exposure to Pallene memes of “democracy” provided a rallying cry for zero-share gangs to become a political power, to whom Pallene merchants sold arms on credit.

The latest incarnation of the Eridani Directorate, founded by the democratic activists and their allies, has remained in power for more than a millennium. Political scientists attribute this longevity to three reasons that amount to: the Federation, the Federation, and the Federation.

First, the activists who overthrew the security board passed a law banning existing owners of EDI shares from purchasing additional shares, but only after the revolutionaries had seized the old board’s shares and distributed them to their key supporters. These revolutionaries and their supporters have formed a permanent overclass with as many collected votes as the one-share masses. Whenever the population reaches a certain threshold the board splits shares, sells off a token amount, and encourages the new two-shares to sell off their “spare share.”

Second, after incorporation into the Federation Pallas distributed immortagenic micromachines to the populations of all three systems, meaning that many of the revolutionaries are still alive. An even larger proportion of the population remember being personally worse off under the previous regime than they are under the current one, even if their great-grandkids aren’t so lucky.

Third, the stargate network provides an outlet for the discontented and a steady stream of replacements. Epsilon Eridani has the highest emigration rate of the core systems but also the second highest immigration rate after the capital. Every time an Outworld is admitted to the Federation the EDI holds a recruiting drive and attempts to set up a branch office. As the quality of life they offer is still better than on the majority of Outworlds they nearly always get many new employees. They also make sure to set up their presence on new Federated colonies as soon as their ships can arrive, both bringing in their own colonists and offering shares to homesteaders in exchange for the use of their lands.

That said, many in the upper echelons of the Federal government are worried about the potential collapse of the current EDI regime’s support system and have been making contingency plans for dealing with the next one.

Federation Sports

What, you thought recreational physical activities would die out in the far future?

Grav Ball: A sport popularized in the Epsilon Eridani system among the orbital population. Played along a 200-meter strip of a Habitat-1 style sphere habitat (500m diameter), centered on the equator. The effective gravity diminishes as one kicks or throws a spherical ball towards the goals on either side but coriolis effects produce some interesting spins that can thrown the ball in unexpected directions to the unpracticed.  Popular legend claims the sport was developed by an eccentric EDI exec and attributes the very existence of rotational habitats in the system to the sport. Though many historians believe spheres were constructed to prevent skeletomuscular degeneration in orbital workers and Grav Ball was invented afterwards to encourage workers to spend time in the high-G sectors.

Meteor: A game specifically designed for parahumans with spacer mods, while players are suited they tend to wear light suits not pressurized below the transparent-aluminum helmet for mobility. The field of play is a cube of space half a kilometer to a side, with 20-meter goal nets on two opposing sides. The teams float in the space without EVA units, using each other or “debris” (originally scattered rocks, now constructs with jutting poles or lines) to maneuver and attempt to fling a 20-centimeter ball towards the opposing goal. Players may use either their natural appendages or a telescoping 10-meter pole with a net on the end to grab and throw the ball. For visibility’s sake both the ball and the players’ spacesuits are covered in blinking lights, the ball changing to the colors of the team that last touched it.  The borders are patrolled by drones with cold thrusters that automatically retrieve balls, debris, or players that leave the playing zone, at the end of the two-hour game they also pick up any players who found themselves dead in the water. Every thirty minutes the game breaks for players to change out their oxygen bottles, delivered by the drones to their positions or vectors. It’s not uncommon for players to spend multiple quarters in the same position until something impacts them.

BloodClaw: Many parahuman species have claws, sharp teeth, or other natural weapons. Historically, many competitive martial artists have been required to cover these in order to limit the chances of accidentally killing a fighter, but the spread of medical microbots changed that. When House Rektol made Outworlder clients fashionable on the world of Janssen literal bloodsports finally crept up from the underground to become an official spectator sport.  Microbots can seal most superficial wounds in minutes, and if their host comes close to death they can force the brain into a state of stasis until they can be resuscitated, with brain scans and external memory up to 50% brain damage is (legally) survivable. Replacement limbs and organs can be bioprinted in hours. With that in mind the practical objections to extremely violent sports were sidestepped.

In original Janssen rules BloodClaw athletes are limited to their phenotype’s natural weaponry, no augments, fighters score points by drawing blood from their opponent and the match ends after five minutes or when one fighter loses consciousness. Many variants exist, ranging from lightning-fast “first blood” bouts to agonizing mutilation bouts and an “aug league” where fighters try to stick on as many blades and bioware as their bodies can fit.

“Flatline” has yet to breach the mainstream, except in the lawless habitats of Barnard’s Star and similar Tortugas. In this variant of BloodClaw the match only ends when one fighter shows no brain activity. Usually the loser can be resuscitated, but Real Death is not an uncommon occurrence. If the victim of this underground match was sufficiently valuable to their patron they might be cloned, but said clones are prone to existential depression that often goes untreated before they die and are replaced by another iteration.

Superheroes Revisited

A while back I wrote about how the concept of superheroes might not fly in a transhumanist setting where anyone with sufficient resources might rebuild themselves into a superman.

But after writing about the different legal systems in the Para-Imperium I had a couple ideas for implementing them. One “above-board” and one “below.”

Sanctioned heroes: The “memetic badass” approach, where the security forces attempt to reduce expenditures by focusing not on big police departments, but on a small group of celebrity supermen with customized augmentations, movie-star good looks, and extensively marketed adventures. Not dissimilar to the purpose of Knights in Shining Armor in Middle Ages Europe. In this case, their purpose is less to fight crime as to dissuade people from committing crime in the first place, so only those with the resources to field their own super-villains, or attention-seekers like the guy Rorschach dropped down an elevator shaft, will dare to commit crimes. Either one tends to suit the entrenched oligarchy just fine, the fights make for good publicity.

A sanctioned superhero’s jurisdiction rarely extends beyond their home planet or habitat, and they’re typically part of a planet- or star system-spanning organization of other heroes. Attempts to form a Federation-wide group like the Green Lantern Corps or their Lensmen predecessors have thus far been stalled in committee.

This approach is vulnerable to the death of a superhero, as crime tends to skyrocket until a new hero manages to build an equal reputation to their predecessor. As such superhero leagues tend to have the best medical care available, including, it is rumored, illegal brain cloning.

Vigilantes: The “shadowrun” approach. These tend to arise most often in polycentric legal systems like the Pallene or Cetan law systems, in which feuds can simmer between factions for decades, centuries with life extension. The romanticized version is a tragic figure like Batman or Zorro who has a legitimate grievance that the conventional authorities failed to address. That type of vigilante does exist, but tend to be short-lived as they right the wrong that led them to take up the cape and then retire, or die trying. The more common variety are mercenaries more akin to Deadpool, supersoldiers for hire willing to act as deniable assets for any House or company with sufficient credit.

Legal Systems of the Core Worlds

The modern Westernized legal system is by no means the only way that things have been mediated throughout human history. It should be no surprise that parahuman legal systems vary widely as well.

Pallene: The Houses prefer to handle things internally whenever possible. The House Primus is responsible for settling disputes between members of their House and is even empowered to impose penalties for misdemeanor crimes against other members. When disputes arise between people in different Houses their Primii will try to sort something out first. But crimes against another House, or torts that get out of hand, the parties involved hire an Arbitrator from the Civil Guard, paying equally. Arbitrators are also called in for every instance of a felony, and especially in the case of murder. Premeditated murder carries an unambiguous death penalty, voluntary manslaughter (“spontaneous murder”) may be reduced to a hefty fine and probation for up to a century under drone surveillance or house arrest. Conspiracy to commit murder merits exile to an Outworld. Lesser penalties tend towards fines and probationary periods that might be reduced if the convict goes to therapy. Punitive incarceration is unheard of.

Gepatrono-klientoj contracts establish somewhat similar legal relationships between patron and client to that between a Primus and their House, but with a key difference. Nobody can be compelled to testify against another member of their House save in the case of capital offenses, but a patron can be made to testify against their client while the inverse is not true. However, patrons are also required to pay their clients’ legal fees and unofficially expected to use their connections in the oligarchy behind the scenes. Simply having a client who’s been convicted of a crime is a stain on the patron’s reputation, if the patron were to break contract when their client got arrested it would be even worse. In fact many Pallene oligarchs have become known for recruiting clients from members of less-wealthy Houses who’ve been accused of a crime.

Cetan: Old system: A caste-based system, when both parties were of the same caste they were judged by a local elder of their caste. For Labor-majority villages this was typically the village headsman. However if the dispute involved members of different castes a judge of the warrior-noble caste was called in. The warriors themselves benefited from a privilege similar to the kiri-sute gomen of Japan’s medieval samurai, allowing them to pass judgement and sentence on commoners who offended them. It was uncommon but not unknown for a commoner who bumped into a warrior on the streets to be cut down on the spot.

Federated: After contact with Alpha Centauri and the formation of a central government the warrior-nobles’ relative power has steadily eroded. Judges are now certified by a central testing system, with others prohibited from passing judgement regardless of caste. More recently it became possible for judges of any caste to arbitrate inter-caste disputes, so long as the judge doesn’t share a caste with either party.

Eridani: The Eridani Directorate (Inc) relies heavily on their surveillance system to detect crimes and dispatch security officers rapidly. Officers will then subdue (if necessary) and issue fines on the spot. The accused can attempt to appeal, but usually they’ll be lucky if they’re allowed to pay gradually. Very little private property in EDI areas is not owned by the company, with residents only leasing it, and the company tends to rate crimes based on damage to its’ property first and the livelihood of residents and employees second.

I recommend looking into David Friedman’s Legal Systems Very Different From Ours for more information.