Heavy Sky: Introduction, glossary and concepts

Heavy Sky is a modern sci-fi setting that mixes various sub-genres, drawing from a whole array of influences. It has some aspects of cyberpunk, with oppressive corporations, exploitative capitalism, and underdog characters eking out a living in a world that is both a plausible but also fantastical future. But there is more. There is a strong post-apocalyptic streak to the setting, with most of the Earth being ruined. But there is also a fair amount of space faring involved, as well as a hefty dose of trans- and posthumanism.

The name implies that the SKY features prominently across the planets: Earth's sky is heavy with storm winds and brutal climate collapse weather, and higher up littered with the remnants of the Bracer War. 

 

Mars' skies are heavy with terraforming nanobots and the promise of a better life for its colonists - to either get away from the Red Planet, or to shape it into a home worth staying on. 

 

Venus' colonies literally hang in the planet's skies. 

 

And the sky of Mercury is either heavy with the all-engulfing sun or the all-encompassing darkness of the Void. 

 

The skies of Jupiter’s moons are filled with the radiation-spewing gas giant, that illuminates the homes of the posthuman Great Houses, who scheme against each other and possibly against the rest of humanity. 

 

In this future life is difficult and people are being tossed across the worlds humans and their offspring inhabit like leaves in the wind. But it is also full of hope, camaraderie, and adventure.

 

Morning breaks on Seramis VI, one of the hanging cities in the Venusian upper atmosphere

 

-----

Stormlands: These are the vast stretches of land on Earth that have become uninhabitable due to runaway climate collapse. Frequent mega storms have carried away most of the topsoil here. No permanent human civilization can survive here. These stretches of the Earth have been emptied, and while some nation states still cling to their former territorial claims, they usually lack the means to enforce any borders, much less any semblance of law here. The ruins of times past riddle these parts. Some hardy people willfully abandon civilized society for reasons of their own and seek their fortunes out here. Some companies still operate extractive operations, heavily guarded and fortified in massive bunkers to withstand the ravages of the heavy weather. Some communities exist out there, nomadic tribes, as well as bunker dwellers. Treasure seeker penetrate deep into the stormlands to scavenge the emptied cities of old.

Earth Government: While some nation-states still nominally exist, corporate entities hold the real power on Earth and beyond. Earth does not have a unified government, but is generally ruled by three competing power blocs: the Earth Trade Organization that serves as the global coordinating body of corporate states, the League of Progressive Peoples remnant, which represents Earth's foothold of the Great Houses of Jupiter, and the People's Republic of China. Earth does not quite speak with one voice. Corporate states like the United Cities of the Arctic Circle and the Chelyabinsk Rus have created essentially new forms of political entities that rival and in many cases exceed what is left of traditional nation-states. Even the half-century of physical isolation from the rest of the Solar System did not lead to any longer-lasting planetary unity.

 

Space Travel: Getting into space is still difficult - if you don't have a mass driver. Linear acceleration catapults make up the bulk of any modern spaceport. These are magnetic accelerators, that pull a rocket-sled along often miles and miles of magnetized rails. Cargo drivers that don't move living, biological humans can be much shorter, but the spaceports that transport living human beings require very long acceleration stretches to allow for a gradual increase of G's. Most space traffic off Earth's surface goes towards the Moon. The lower lunar gravity allows for a better energy / acceleration ratio, and thus makes Luna a better point of departure for interplanetary travel. Rocket-sleds accelerate a payload and detach, allowing for repeated reuses. Spacecraft use fusion-powered drives to traverse the void. Most biological humans are put into hibernation for interplanetary travel, which takes anywhere from a little over a month between Earth and Mars or Venus, several months between Earth and Mercury or up to multiple years if one tries venturing into the outer system. 

A long distance tug maneuvering inside one of Earth's cleared orbital paths.

The Bracer War: The past centuries saw first an explosion in the construction of orbital habitats in Earth's orbit, as anyone with the necessary means tried to escape an increasingly uninhabitable planet. The band of orbital habitats became known as the Braclet, its denizens as Bracers. Life on the artificial Bracer colonies was good for those who could afford it. However, as it is with most hyper-wealthy people these Bracers had their various interests spread out far and wide across human-settled space. It was only a matter of time before they would end up pitched one against the other. And so a tense web conflict began to brew across the Bracer. Whether it was an act of sabotage or a mere accident, an explosion seventy-two years ago lead to the disintegration of the mid-sized Lagrange Point habitat Trafalgar Station. This was in turn read by allied factions of the station’s most influential interests as an act of open war by their respective enemies. These factions then engaged in swift retaliations. It would later turn out that the destruction of Trafalgar Station caused a game theory cascade: many of the influential factions in orbit had their weapons trained on whoever they deemed a threat. The Trafalgar Incident then resulted in most factions to believe that an enemy faction would believe themselves the attacker, and strike against them in revenge. So to prevent a revenge strike, many factions simply started wiping out each other, which in turn caused other interests to engage in similar behavior. Before the day was over, the Bracer was in a process of cascading destruction, leaving behind few surviving habitats and a cloud of space debris that made artificial satellites almost impossible and landing spaceships on Earth very difficult for the coming generations.

 

Bracers: Today there are two variants of people described by this word. Old Bracers are mega-rich who escaped Earth in the twenty-first and twenty-second century, settling instead on the orbital colonies making up Earth’s Bracelet. As the Bracer War destroyed most of these colonies, the survivors fled to the colonies on Luna and collectively began to significantly support the Seramis Project on Venus, which today is home to the biggest “Old Bracer” colony. 

Old Bracers are generally very, very rich. Most inner planet corporations and nation-states are run by Old Bracers, and their influence runs extremely deep. It is said that the crushing of the Martian independence movement was based on the conviction of the Bracers that own most of Mars that the Martian population are to behave in ways they dictate since it was their money that financed Martian settlement. Old Bracers are not just extremely rich, they are also very old. Their extreme wealth has allowed them to invest substantially in life-prolonging technologies. Some of the oldest Bracers have uploaded their consciousnesses into machine brains, in order to cheat death. Not all of those have survived into the presence fully intact - but their fortunes have. Many Bracers pursue passion projects of extreme duration. Their functional immortality is a reason for so many of them to have thrown their power and influence behind Seramis.

It is believed that as of 2250 there are forty-five Old Bracers left. Among them they share about ninety percent of the collective wealth of the inner planets. One of the reasons for this extreme wealth concentration is that the Bracer War wiped out a substantial amount of them and allowed the survivors to scoop up the remains. 

New Bracers have adopted the moniker out of a sense of cynicism. They are those who work in Earth’s orbit, clearing up the traffic lanes for the spaceports of space borne debris. A New Bracer existence is precarious, however pay can be quite lucrative, if one has the stomach for the job. 

 

The Martian Civil War: While Earth was cut off from her colonies in the aftermath of the Bracer War, the colonies on Mars especially acquired an unhealthy taste of freedom. Of course Earthlings kept sending instructions, orders, and requests to Mars during that time. But Earth’s isolation and lack of physical representation robbed the Martian administration of its legitimacy. When the Earthling overlords returned after fifty-seven years of isolation, Mars greeted few of them with open arms. A few years passed. With the resentment in the populace grew the arrogance of the Earth-borne administrations. Eventually Martian workers and slum outcasts rose up in an attempt to throw off the Earthen yoke, but to no avail. The response was a brutal crackdown of the corporate regimes. A wave of terrorist attacks across the inner planets followed, targeting installations of Earth's corporate and state governments. These atrocities robbed the Martian resistance of its foothold in the population, and under the combined weight of public resentment and increasingly drastic responses by government forces, the Martian independence movement fell apart. Martian society still has not quite recovered. A political movement for Martian autonomy is still active in the underground, occasionally carrying out acts of terror against the government and against Earth sympathizers. If the project of Martian independence is viable is unclear.

 

The Seramis Project: What began with the massive hanging cities in the Venusian atmosphere, over the years evolved into an effort to completely terraform Venus. This is an the most expensive, and most long-lasting project humans have ever tried to undertake. It is currently in the initial phase, in which giant space mirrors are installed around Venus in order to cool down the atmosphere. This endeavor will likely take centuries, but at the end humanity will be granted a second Earth-like planet with similar gravity and atmospheric composition. And it will entirely belong to the five hyper wealthy families who are funding the lion's share of the project.

 

Iovian Collectives / The Great Houses of Jupiter: The Jovian Collectives lack individual thought and experience. They do not perceive time and space in the same manner as normal humans do. The Great Houses of Jupiter are Posthuman entities, comprised of thousands of individuals consciousnesses uploaded into massive quantum computers, that have merged into new forms of quasi-digital sapience. These digital beings are a new step in human evolution. They originated in the pre-stormland League of Progressive Peoples, evolving out of the LPP’s cyberbrain hiveminds. The LPP’s colony on the Jupiter moon Europa formed the first true collective. Out of the colonist’s hivemind emerged a new, over-arching consciousness. This consciousness eventually transferred itself onto a custom built quantum mainframe, which gave birth to the first Iovian Collective, the first Great House of Jupiter. In the decades that followed, new hive-mind consciousnesses emerged among LPP communities all over the Solar System. These followed the model laid out by the first Iovian Collective, including settling on Europa and soon after on other moons of Jupiter. Since that time, many more Great Houses have emerged. They require only energy to run the machines they operate on and no longer share any common biological components with humans. Collectives are somewhat democratic in their conflict resolutions, between the individual minds operating beneath the surface. As an overarching political entity they do not speak with one voice. Not all the houses agree on all issues. Not all houses desire the same things. Some desire more power for themselves, some desire more power for the Great Houses against the rest of humanity. Some seek peaceful coexistence, others are suspicious of baseline humanity. And a few wish to pre-emptively wipe Earth and its spawn clean. The Great Houses are generally rather introvert, and most of them cannot be bothered with affairs of the outside world mind - that is what their representative Avatars are there for. And while they have so far been peaceful, their technology is advanced in strange ways compared to that of the inner planets. An armed conflict between Jupiter and the inner planets would likely have devastating consequences for both sides. Many Old Bracers despise the collectives, for they almost completely elude their grasp.

 

Avatars: The myriads of minds that were uploaded into the Jovian Collectives lack individual thought and experience. As a whole, the collectives do not perceive time and space in the same manner as normal humans do. In some way, all Collectives constantly experience a very complex array of overlaid dreams and simulations. After a century or so, however, they found that without fresh experiences not borne out of a simulated virtual environment, their artificial minds began to deteriorate. They constantly required new, authentic inputs. The steady stream of new converted humans who joined the collectives turned out to be too unpredictable to guarantee the long-time survival of most collectives. But also, as the Great Houses grew in size, their perception of time became so distorted that they increasingly had difficulties interacting with the outside world. To amend this, Collectives created beings capable of individual thought and experience that were meant to mingle with biological humans. They would be able to have individual experiences outside of the collectives, that could then feed fresh impressions and prevent deterioration. They could also serve as interlocutors and ambassadors between the Collectives and the Inner System. Avatars or "Evers" are artificial cyborg bodies housing a unique consciousness that has been woven together from bits and pieces of disparate personalities of a single Great House. Each Great House has produced several thousand of these. Today Evers are quite numerous in the Inner System. Most Evers identify themselves as such towards baseline humans. However there have been many cases known that did not, who instead lived in secret. This has resulted in many vicious conspiracy theories. Also, rumor has it that Evers exist among humanity that themselves do not know what they are. Most biological humans regard known Evers with at least some suspicion, but some of the artificial persons have achieved high levels of individual success within human society none the less. Most Avatars are visually indistinguishable from biological humans or anthroform shells. After an indeterminate period of time, an Ever will return to the Jovian Moons to re-enter its collective and donate its life experience and its entire consciousness back to the Great House that once birthed it.

 

Informorphs: These entities are digital, sapient life-forms that are either the result of artificial intelligence creation, or of human brainscans. Both entities are referred to as informorphs. Human informorphs can be installed into a large array of platforms, softshells, hardshells, and whatever kind of installation that houses a brainframe. Informorphs are essentially immortal. The technology to create these beings has been in existence for several centuries, and while a small number of methusaleic infomorphs exist, they are not very common. The technology took a long time to truly mature. Early informorphs were not viable on the long term and frequently suffered from long-term data corruption. The oldest fully viable digital human is thought to be about hundred and sixty years old, however some rather erratic brainscans are much older. The oldest truly sapient artificial intelligence is somewhat younger. The first such entity was destroyed during the Bracer War. The Great Houses are themselves also strictly speaking informorphs, albeit of a different caliber and entirely incompatible with anything baseline humanity has managed to produce. 

 

Telecast travel:As beings of pure data, informorphs can "travel" to other locations via data transmission. This is illegal in many jurisdictions, as long distance telecasting of an informorph essentially copies the data construct and then requires that the original left behind at the point of origin is destroyed. 

This also introduces the "coin-toss problem" - copying and destroying a digital consciousness means that the original can never be certain if this consciousness will continue in the traveled copy, or be the one destroyed.

 

Shells: Artificial bodies come in a dizzying array of shapes these days. Not all of them are machine bodies either. For those who can afford it, inhabit gengineered bodies - genetically optimized, modified, altered. These are generally referred to as "softshells" - usually housing a brainframe inside an otherwise completely or partially bio engineered body. These bodies are often tailored to specific needs, extra-terrestrial environments, or Another variation are hardshells, machine bodies that come in a large variation of shapes and sizes.

 

Bioroids: Artificial, genetically designed creatures. Bioroids have been around for centuries. They come in all shapes and sizes and fulfill a plethora of functions. Some are said to have achieved sapience. Several political entities across settled space claim these creatures should neither be produced, nor exploited in the way they are. Other political entities oppose their existence on the matter that they often take up positions that could be used for human workers. The League of Progressive People prohibits Bioroid labor, and only allows them in public safety positions. The People's Republic of China has summarily outlawed bioroid presence in its jurisdictions. However, some Chinese companies produce them for foreign markets.

---------

All images used in this post are the work of Paul Chadeisson. They are more of a mood board, it's not like I could ever afford to hire him. https://www.artstation.com/pao