by Tony Daniel
Interlocking Directorate
The main governing board of the Met. The directorates are administrative and legislative agencies whose activities and administrators are voted on by the population of the Met constantly over the governmental merci channels. These can sometimes change hourly. The Interlocking Directorate membership is voted on, in turn, by the Directors. Director Amés chairs the Interlocking Directorate.
Keys
Used for currency in the Carbuncle.
Motoserra Club
Hoity-toity club to which descendants of the first settlers on Neptune’s moon Triton belong.
Neo-Flares
Modern day poets who style themselves as revivalists of the ancient Flare school of poetry.
Old Seventy-Five
Alcoholic drinking grist. Thaddeus-Ben drinks a version modified with military grist and accidentally coughs up a woman.
Positions Room
The command center of Teleman Milt financial services.
Sluice Juice
Breathable Integumentary fluid in the Met.
Snap-Metal Advertisements
Virtual reality advertisements set into grist-coated stickers, on beverage containers, etc.
Teleman Milt
A financial brokerage company on Mercury’s E-street for which Kelly Graytor was a junior partner.
Trade Economists
Pro-Met political faction on Neptune’s moon Triton.
METAPLANETARY GEOGRAPHY: THE MET & INNER SOLAR SYSTEM
Asteroid Belt
Cut-off point for the Met. Cloudships began forming here, incorporating as a materials shipment service for the building of the Met. This old company was called Alquitran Incorporated. There are Alquitran relics and historic landmarks in the asteroid belt.
Bach
The principal city of Mercury and the financial center of the Met. Situated in the Bach crater. The architect Klaus Branigan designed much of the city. Branigan claimed to have based his conception upon structures he found in the final movement of Bach’sHarpsichord Concerto Number One in D minor . Like Bach, with his two interwoven themes, Branigan took essentially two cities and knitted them together. First, there is residentialCalay , with its bulbous pearl strings of apartments. These exist between the square, almost mineral, stretches ofNew Frankfurt and its central corridor,Earth Street , which houses the powerful banks and brokerages of the Met.
Bagtown
The nearest thing to a city in the Carbuncle. Near where the garbage sluice from the Met comes in.
Bendy River
The slough-like river of goo that runs through the Carbuncle.
Carbuncle
The Carbuncle is the garbage dump of the Met. Filled with mutated and unregulated grist, this is where all the old code comes to die and where all the escaped code comes to hide. It is located at the outer fringes of the Met, just inside the asteroid belt. The “protocol vermin” — escaped code sequences that inhabited actual biological vermin — arose here before the war and were developed into fully functioning human beings when they migrated to Nirvana, the independent “micro-Met,” or mycelium, of the Friends of Tod which circles the sun inside the Martian orbit.
Clarit Bolsa
An average working class habitat on the Vas. Dory Folsom, DIED sergeant, hails from there.
Earth
Sparsely inhabited. A few major population centers remain, including New York City. In 2802 C.E., the Earth was declared an “Ecological Repatriation Area” with limited construction and population growth allowed, and now vast stretches of our native planet have been returned to their natural state.
Integument
The Integument is the outer coating of the Met cables and the Met spinning habitats. This is a semi-living “skin” that mediates biological and chemical transfer and balance within the Met, and forms a protective covering. It a product of both design and stepped-up evolution. No one normally lives in the Integument, but it can be accessed.
Mars
Densely inhabited. Home to Bradbury University. Victim of the failed terraforming experiments of the 2700s C.E.
Mas El Daví
Carmen San Filieu’s estate in New Catalonia.
Mercurian Transportation System
The South Vect is the main polar transportation conduit on Mercury which leads to theSouth Polar Lift - known locally asthe Hub , it leads, in turn, to the transfer habitat above the Mercurian pole,Johnson Bolsa .
Mercury
The financial and governmental center of the Met. High population density. Principal city is Bach. Earth Street, or E-Street, is equivalent to the old Wall Street on Earth.
Moon
Inhabited. Greentree shaman-priests initiated in Valley of the Bones. Cloudship Tacitus and Lebedev’s human aspects met in old Farside Station in mid-2400s C.E.
Mycelium
AKAa micro-met . A small system of cables that is not directly connected to the overall Met, but that participates in the virtuality through the grist and can be reached either by spaceship or by occasional concatenation with the larger Met. The most important of the mycelia is Nirvana, the self-made home base of the Friends of Tod.
New Catalonia
Met habitat on the Diaphany where the locals, descendants of Catalán from old Spain, play wicked social games in a late Renaissance setting. The principal city is New Sabadell.
Polbo Armature
Agricultural habitat on the Diaphany and birthplace of one Claude Schlencker.
Ru June’s
A rowdy bar in the Carbuncle.
San Souci
The central edifice on Mercury in the vast conglomerate of buildings, all interconnected, that make up the Interlocking Directorate Headquarters in the Met. It includes, in its center, a small mountain made entirely of grist, Montsombra. La Mola is the inner sanctum of Amés. It is atop Montsombra.
Silicon Valley
The Noctus Labyrithus area on Mars which served as a concentration camp for free converts during the war. Mengele-like research is conducted there on selected free converts by the infamous Dr. Ting.
METAPLANETARY GEOGRAPHY: OUTER SYSTEM
THE PLANETS
Outer System
Area beyond the asteroid belt, including Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, the Keipers and the Oorts. Space cables are not feasible to build here, and the distances are covered by spaceships. All outer system planetary moons are inhabited. There is grist everywhere, so outer system inhabitants fully participate in the virtuality of humanity. At the beginning of the war, the outer system was nominally under Met sovereignty, but in practice most government was local. While the population of the outer system is much more thinly spread than that of the Met, it is still enormous by historic standards. At the beginning of the war, it numbered nearly 50 billion, with the Met claiming another 70 billion souls (in their various forms), for a total human population of around 120 billion. The bulk of the outer system population lives on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Jupiter
All of the Jovian moons are inhabited.
Callistohad a utopian “free grange” movement, and some free grange collectives still exist. Alethea Nighshade was raised on one of these.
Ganymedeis the center of commerce for the outer planets. Ganymede also has plate tectonics, and earthquake-inducing warfare technology was used to secure its fall early in the war.
Europa: A scientific disaster in the Lost Sea of Europa — a vast sea under a layer of ice — resulted in the death of Roger Sherman’s eldest son and Leo Sherman’s brother, Teddy. There may be an extraterrestrial nano life-form there. Leo Sherman lived on Europa for a while before returning to the Met.
Saturn
All of Saturn’s moons are inhabited. The largest population is in the moon Titan’s principal city, Laketown. Titan, the second largest moon in the solar system, has a thick atmosphere that manifests as a reddish brown photochemical haze. The locals have come to like this color.
U
ranus
The Uranus system is the poorest area in the outer system, and, before the war, the local government was essentially a puppet for Met business interests.
Neptune
All moons inhabited. An important provider of energy in the outer system.The Mill operates within the semi-permanent storm known as The Blue Eye of Neptune.
Tritonis the major population center. Its principal city is New Miranda. The Triton temperature can get down to thirty-eight degrees Kelvin, that is, -390 Fahrenheit. You can put a simple substance in the shade here, and it will become a superconductor. At the average temperatures and pressure on Triton, the nitrogen atmosphere hovers around its solid-gas-liquid triple point, and occasionally conditions will be right for the formation of the famous nitrogen rains. Triton is easily the coldest inhabited place in the solar system. Even Pluto, built on different geology, is warmer by a little.
Triton’sNew Miranda is named after the Uranean moon Miranda, from which the first settlers hailed. It is built on the side of an enormous crater in the southern hemisphere of Triton. New Miranda is a city of spires. The neo-gothic religious leanings of the first settlers combined with the low gravity of their new world to produce an architecture that is unique and, at times, breath-taking. There are some apartment buildings here and there, but for the most part each resident on Triton has his or her own spire — that is, families and familiar units do. In most of the spires, the first five floors are fully pressurized and protected. They are usually given over to gardens and fountains. New Miranda bills itself as the “Garden City,” and there is a friendly competition among the more affluent residents in that regard. Of course, this has led to a few aesthetic horrors. But there is a professional class of elite gardeners who are strongly influenced by the Greentree priest (and gardener) Father Capability, and many of the gardens are justly regarded as works of art. These are another tourist attraction on Triton, along with the nitrogen rains outside. New Miranda is governed by the Town Meet.
The moonNereid is an important shipping port. It was the site of the first use of full-scale nanotechnological warfare by the outer system forces when the DIED shipJihad was infected with the PAL grist virus.
Pluto
The surface of Pluto is almost entirely covered with grist. The planetary geology is reshaped almost continually to serve shipping, which is the principal activity of the inhabitants. The poet Beat Myer wrote of Pluto that it is “where the stones go to die.” Pluto has an infamous orphanage where Kwame Neiderer was raised.
Oorts
The debris on the outer edge of the solar system. Sparsely inhabited by biological humans, but home to the cloudships. A source of a great deal of material for the construction of the Met.
OTHER PLACES & PHENOMENA IN THE OUTER SYSTEM
Dark Matter Road
Discovered in the late 2800s C.E., the Dark Matter Road is a stretch of unreflective material that lies between the solar system and the double-starred Centauri System. In 2903 C.E., Cloudship Mark Twain became the first human being to visit another solar system when he arrived at Alpha Centari during that e-year. Cloudship Lebedev arrived there eleven years later, in 2914 C.E.
Del Rings
The rings of Saturn, renamed during the war for a heroic free convert.
Laketown
Main city on Titan, Saturn’s moon. The “lake” is a lake of liquid ethane, and Laketown is at its edge. The area nearest the lake is called New Alki. The local mean temperature is minus 180 Celsius.
Mill
An enormous windmill in the Blue Eye of Neptune consisting of two blades that turn with the swirl of the storm. The Mill, from blade tip to blade tip, is as long as the diameter of planet Earth. It was built on the same physical principles as the Met. In the center of the mill, operating in a manner not dissimilar to that of ancient hydroelectric turbines on Earth, is a generator that beams a steady supply of microwave energy to a geosyncronous satellite stationed above it. And from that satellite, it is fed to Triton.
Object 71449-00450
AKAthe Object . A cometisimal in the Oorts that houses a mining colony. Kwame Neiderer was born here.
Shepardsville
The degenerate red light district located in the local virtuality on Triton.
Windows
Ghost town in the local Triton virtuality.
METAPLANETARY WARFARE
Boomerang
Formerly the DIED shipJihad which captured, for a time, the Neptunian moon Nereid. The official first spaceship to enter the Federal Navy.
Cloudship Warfare
seeCloudship
Fremden
DIED military slang for outer system inhabitants. The term means “strangers” in old German.
Glory
Pleasurable sensation of well-being and pride sent through the vinculum to DIED soldiers who do a good job. Can be orgasmic.
Grist-based Attack
Using the grist as a military weapon. Various permutations, including a communications warfare attack that permanently disables the Broca grist in the victim and turns him or her into a gibbering idiot.
Knit
Special “channel” of the merci reserved for Federal Army.
Met Navy: Ships of War
Met spaceships used for warfare are not self-contained LAPS. They are usually commanded by a LAP, but that captain is not the control structure of the ship, only the command. The ships are under the auspices of the Department of Immunity Enforcement Division Space Marine Task Force, and their names are prefaced by that entity’s initials in Basis, DIED. These are the Met ships of war.
TheDirac Class of Cruisers: These are the DIED all-purpose ships. They are used for transport, and have weaponry for light attack functions, normally as “ground clearing” for the infantry about to be deployed. They might have a torpedo or two, but their principal weapon is a short-range positron cannon working off the antimatter engine, and several projectile catapults, the most fearsome of which is the flak ram which shoots off the dreaded “nail rain” that can tear a kilometer of ground to shreds — neatly preparing it for occupation.
TheDabna class of Destroyers: These serve both attack and transport functions. They are big and long, with a thousand-meter girth and a ten kilometer length. They possess long-range antimatter cannon and torpedoes and catapults that will handle up to a hundred tons of material. They can also deploy special devices, such as the rip tether that was put to such awful use on Triton.
TheStreichhöltzer Class of Carriers: There were, at the outbreak of hostilities, twenty of these in the fleet. These carry a full range of weaponry and a large crew, as well as serving as a base for smaller attack and transport craft. Here you will find the production facilities for military grist and deployment devices for it, as well. Carriers are also notable because they are constructed on the same principles as the Met cables, held together by macro implementation of the strong nuclear force. As such, they are imposing fortresses, indeed. They maneuver well in two dimensions, but their immense momentum makes them difficult to pilot attitudinally. This is not the case for a special class of carrier, the Lion of Africa division, which is basically a carrier filled with antimatter engines; these also serve as weapons by quick conversion. They have a smaller crew and their specialty is to enact disaster events.
SolandSciatica Classes: The principal ships which depend upon the Streichhöltzer Class carriers are theSol andSciatica classes. TheSol class is a transport vessel designed for quick planetary landings of about 500 troops.Sciatica class ships are attack craft, also designed for planetary operations. These boast a deadly array of close-range weaponry. They have something of the appearance of a pitchfork with wings. Both theSol andSciatica class is aerodynamically built, and able to withstand huge pressure differential — something the larger ships are incapable of, as witness the destruction of theSchwarzes Floß when it fell into the atmosphere of Jupiter.
Zip CodeClass: A specialized class of ships which are communications boats
. These have major defense armaments and fields, but only a single cannon, which operates off the engine. These vessels are mostly grist matrix, and they resemble spinning dumb bells, or jacks from the children’s game of pick-up. They proved vulnerable to counter-informational insurgency.
Met Navy: Engineering and Operations
Except for the planetary and communications craft, most DIED ships are based upon the “spinning scythe” design. They greatly resemble bundles of these implements bound together in a clump, but come with blades depending from them all along their length. It is not without cause that, at times, the Met navy was referred to as “the reapers.” All of these ships have, as their end, large-scale murder. Operations which require spin-induced gravity are carried out in the “blades” of the scythes, and these also usually contain officer’s quarters and command and control. Most of the weaponry is found in the long “handle” of the body, and it was here that attacks were most profitably directed. Ship defenses are varied and effective.
Met Navy Defense: Electromagnetic Damping: You cannot hit a ship and depressurize the entire thing. Most nuclear weaponry is damped in the vicinity of a ship by powerful electromagnetic fields which control the rate of nucleus fission and keep it to a one-to-one basis. This immediately turns the fission trigger of a fusion bomb into a mere nuclear reactor and prevents a runaway chain reaction.
Met Navy Defense: Isotropic Coating: The most powerful defensive system on a DIED ship, however, is the so-called “isotropic coating” each ship possesses. This coating makes use of the electroweak force of nature. Through a process calledquantum induction , predicted, in its essence, by Raphael Merced, the exchange of messenger particles within the atomic nucleus can be controlled, and the actual spin of individual nucleons adjusted. The isotropic coating interacts with all incoming energies and particles (including micrometeorites and the like) and changes what is known as the “mixing angle” of an atomic nuclei that make up the ship in that section. In effect, this causes the material of the ship to appear to the incoming weapon as an entirelydifferent substance. If the weapon is, say, a stream of positrons, the ship will “seem,” to the positrons, to be made of antimatter, and the beam will fall upon it as would a ray of light. Small particles are passed through the ship, “believing” themselves to be passing through vacuum. It is an odd and sometimes frightening sight to see a chunk of rock move through one side of a ship and out the other as if the ship were a ghost.