------------------------------- ATC2 - A Galaxy Full of Stars: World Information ------------------------------- This file outlines all the inhabited parts of the solar system, and those few places outside it where people live. There are approximately 13 billion human beings in the solar system and beyond. This is below the projected estimate for 2089 by a great deal. The NeoHippy rebellion and the war with the Bugs cut the human population by an immense number, and the move to space and Twenty-Four syndrome have both reduced the birthrate a tremendous amount, down to less than a 10% increase in population per year. It is expected that this will rise within the next twenty years. Earth ***** Earth is practically a pleasure planet at this point. With a world population of around only two billion (a full quarter of what it was right before the exodus to Mars), much of what was once inhabited land is once again wilderness. Automation has almost completely taken over the farm industry, or what little remains of it. Most food is grown hydroponically, in AgroRigs that float several hundred feet off the ground, collecting ambient moisture and nutrients through nanite filters. This is where most of the food for Mars comes from, due to the lack of fertile ground and atmosphere there. The people on Earth are almost all rich. Seriously, filthy rich. Ludicrously wealthy. So full of money they don't know what to do with it. Despite the fact that real estate is more plentiful than ever, it has only increased in price, especially after most of the unused land was declared protected by various countries. People live in the major cities that existed before the exodus, now transformed into gleaming towers of shiny earthquake, fire, tornado, lightning, and flood resistant materials. People spend their time having fun, and the ones who actually have to work do so for the Earth headquarters of such illustrious corporations as ATC and Calhoun Electronics. Society is remarkably like that of high-class Victorian England, actually. Technology on Earth is present, but mostly hidden. Automated processes go on underneath streets or in sheds, never where anyone can see. Nanites are frowned upon except for where they are necessary. Nanoassembled items are seen as cheap, and the real item is always preferred. Twenty-Fours on Earth are seen with curiosity, and though there is a subtle competition for whose son or daughter has the "best" mutation, the powers are rarely used, and almost never for anything but a mere demonstration. Some have taken to using powers for artistic purposes, however (magnetic control for sculpture, etc). There is a single Earth government now, a new development since 2064, and it delights in having no formal ties to any Martian government. Earth people all speak Earthese, an English-based language built for subtlety and nuance. Characters from Earth are likely young jetsetters out to explore the solar system - the elder residents are usually busy maintaining households and inviting each other over for rounds of golf or whatnot. Education levels are high, though rarely in anything practical. Of course, there is always a black sheep in every family... Mars **** While Earth has become a stereotype of affluence, Mars is slowly coming to its own as the new home of humanity. Cities are growing, and as the terraforming effort continues, Mars begins to have an actual countryside. The total population of Mars is just under 7 billion beings, distributed in under a thousand total cities. The largest city is Red Atlanta - at 50 million residents, it is the densest city ever built by humans. Following up is Twilight City, at 44 million residents. There are eight other "major" cities, of 30 million people each, and several other cities of more than ten million. Finally, there are several hundred cities of a million or so each, and thousands of little industrial domes scattered over the surface of Mars. If you hadn't gotten it yet, Mars is dense. The cities were all originally built in craters, in order to fill them with an atmosphere and not need a dome. Now, the cities spill out of the crater wall and spread their tentacles out across the rock plains. Due to the advances in terraforming, some of them have actual atmospheres outside the crater walls now; these cities are slowly dismantling the walls for raw materials. Despite the large cities, a vast portion of Mars is unpopulated, even untouched. It is a series of dune seas and underground ice floes. The occasional rich Earther can be seen, performing some extreme sport or another, hundreds of miles away from the nearest habitation. Despite the wilderness, the terraforming has been very successful, and several thousand square miles of Martian terrain are now arable lands, complete with running water and temperate climate. Food on Mars is either imported from Earth or grown - the food from the new land is extremely expensive. Meat is gotten from hybrids that barely have the brain to breathe anymore. They are stocked in warehouses below the surface like cargo, and chemically maintained. "Real" meat from Earth is also insanely expensive. Mars people are your standard cyberpunk fare. They are born watching TVNet, the integrated web/television multimedia whatnot. Most of them are educated with it, since even the "public" schools cost a lot to get into. There are gangs, fights, crime, crime syndicates (though no big ones), but for the most part, they're just people trying to get along. For all intents and purposes, Mars is what Earth should have become - all types of people, all types of life. There are 11 countries on Mars. Here's a list: English-Speaking Coalition Red Japan Red France Red China Red India Red Russia Red Germany Red Mexico Red Korea Red Sweden Red South Africa Of course, when on Mars, the descriptor "Red" is often dropped. These countries are described in < Corporations.txt > All these countries except Red South Africa speak Marsal, a one-time English dialect that has skewed off into another language. Here are a list of the top five cities by size on Mars, and a short description of each: Red Atlanta (50.3 million citizens), ES Coalition --> Red Atlanta is the headquarters of ATC, and though still one of the largest cities in 2064, has rocketed out in front by several million inhabitants. Red Atlanta was the first city to have a terreformed area and breach its crater retaining wall. What was once a sprawling industrial sector is now refitted into a residential sector of impressive magnitude, but it is dwarfed by the commercial starscrapers built within the crater walls. It is an affluent city, by Mars standards, and ATC spares few expenses keeping the citizenry here happy. In addition, the size and density of the city cause a culture not unlike that of present-day New York - a mixing of a little bit of everything, and a place where nothing is truly unexpected. Most of the sleythin who live outside their own city live here, with a small section of the city being labeled "Sleythintown" for the two thousand or so inhabitants. Crime is low, thanks to high education and a vigilant police force. It is the standard by which all other cities are judged. Think present-day New York, and you'll have a pretty good idea of how Red Atlanta fits in with the rest of Mars. Twilight City (43.7 million citizens), ES Coalition --> Twilight City is a dark place, the perfect counterpart to Red Atlanta. After the Agrias Corporation, who sponsored Twilight City, failed, there was a distinct lack of another corporation or government filling the void. Soon enough, it became impossible. Twilight City became an anarchy, with public services only working because everyone agrees they have to. There are enough interruptions of things like water and power with the gang warfare as it is. Twilight City lives in the perpetual shadow of Mount Olympus, only recieving light for a few hours a day, hence the name. The city sprawls out, one of the few cities with no crater retaining wall to speak of, and more domes pop up every month. Three gangs of Twenty-Four control the city, and the lure of these gangs to other unruly Twenty-Four helps to eliminate troublemakers in the other cities for sure. There is constant warfare, and nobody who lives in the city can be assumed to be innocent of any of it. There are no bystanders. Twilight City survives on vice - you can purchase anything here, and many people do. It also survives as a town of cheap labor and hard jobs, ones nobody else wants. It is a town for people with no place else to go; the metaphorical "end of the line". Red Tokyo (33.4 million citizens), Red Japan --> Red Tokyo is home to Calhoun Electronics (CEC), the only corporation with enough size and talent to rival ATC for global control. CEC has, in the past twenty or so year,s relinquished governmental control, and the duly elected government has taken the liberty of totally revamping the city. Now almost as shiny as Red Atlanta, the city does not sprawl, but rather emits a sense of tidiness to it, of being exactly what it needs to be. The architecture is slowly showing signs of traditional Japanese construction (think vestigal pagoda roofs, etc.). Red Tokyo is the cultural and literal heart of Red Japan. The government is housed there, so, like Red Atlanta, it gets very good education and the best of everything Red Japan and CEC can offer. Red Tokyans are just now re-exploring the culture and history of the past, and some of them are getting way too into it. But on the whole, it's a congenial city, with a warm side Red Atlanta lacks. Red Cape Town (33.2 million citizens), Red South Africa --> As Red South Africa took most of the brunt from the population of Africa, so Red Cape Town has become the mecca for African peoples. Unlike the other "capital" cities, Red Cape Town has a very high degree of segregation, something usually unheard of on Mars. In fact, it alone has retained some of the original Earth languages, instead of adopting the universally used Martian. The city is crowded and the 33.2 million mark is misleading - there are at least four or five million more vagrants there not registered as citizens. While not as bad as Twilight City, crime is still rampant. It is a slum city - not violent and chaotic like Twilight City, it does not have the glamour and polish of Red Atlanta or Red Tokyo. Red New York (32.4 million citizens), ES Coalition --> Red New York is one of the few cities in the ES Coalition not controlled by ATC in some manner. There is no ATC facility in Red New York to speak of, and they have their own city council that does very well at regulating. As a result, it is also the city with the fewest acres of terraformed land, excluding Twilight City. Red New York is an artistic city, done in a lot of art deco and with sculpture and murals everywhere. It is a haven, really; an alternative to Twilight City for intellectuals and people who dislike the rule of ATC over the ES Coalition. As a result, the populace here is extremely well-educated, possibly the highest in all Mars, and "independent" R&D places are everywhere. A town of tinkerers and scientists, or philosophers and artists. Welcome to Red New York. Venus ***** Venus used to be nothing but a conglomerate of gas-mining stations. It still is, but now there is something else; a single, large city. Avalon is a city, comprised of a thousand or so connected modular sections, of varying size and shape. Between the sections are tied, bolted and lashed vacuoles of lighter gas, that enable the entire city to float high in Venus' atmosphere, below some of the lighter gases, but above the potentially harmful gases. Like iron. While residents of the gas mining colonies are generally seen as backward hicks, and usually are, the residents of Avalon are more cultured. But of course, compared to places like Red Atlanta or Red New York, they are pitifully backward. Most of the residents were born on Venus, people who got sick of the boredom of gas mining and moved on up to the "Big City". For some it's a stepping ground, and they move on to Mars. For some, it's the end of the line, and they stay there the rest of their lives. Neither the mining stations or Avalon are bad places to live. Nanite technology has granted a degree of comfort that usually wouldn't be possible in pre- fabricated or cobbled-together places like that. But Venus is rich with all sorts of elements, especially ones good for building things like plastic, and so Avalon trails a molecular feed cable down into the mists below it, like a tail. Venus, in total, has about 200 million people on it, 20 of which reside in Avalon. Venusians speak heavily accented Marsal. Asteroids ********* The asteroid colonies are scattered across the belt. Nobody really knows how many of them there are - cults like the NeoAmish and the Space Mormons are isolationist in nature, and some colonies have just been flat-out lost. The method for making an asteroid colony is thus - start mining the inside of an asteroid. As you go, fill the inside with gas and a heating system. Have the miners live in the gas-filled excavated area. When you're done, open the excavated, terraformed inside up as a colony. Very simple, and very easy, and VERY cheap due to the profit from the ore. Which is why there are so many asteroid colonies. About 500 million people live in all the various colonies, and each colony has a life and a livelihood all its own. Several thousand of them are owned by ATC, but the thousands more once owned by other corps are free now. There is only one thing consistent with each asteroid colony - the people born there make born spaceship pilots. Almost all asteroid colonies use a heavy variant of Marsal called Spacer. Moons of Jupiter and Saturn *************************** As the human race expands, colonies have been places on several of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, especially Europa, which has become an expensive resort palace, as well as one of the gateways to the planet Sleythin. These colonies are almost all ATC- or CEC-funded. Some of them are mere research stations, for some very dangerous research, and some are actually true colonies. Both corporations are trying to establish supply lines out to Pluto, and if you believe the conspiracy theorists, out beyond the Oort cloud, and from there to a FTL system. But none of that is proven, of course. The research stations are filled with people who likely don't want to be there. The colonies are filled with people who have nowhere else to go. It's an odd dichotomy. The Moon colonies tend to speak mixes of Marsal and Spacer. Sleythin ******** Before the Sleythin introduced a visa process for humans wanting to visit/live in the City of Refuge, a couple thousand slipped in. They live in relative harmony with the Sleythin, despite the Sleythin thinking of them as rather impulsive beings. It doesn't take much for a human to learn to live with the odd Sleythin caste system, which they technically float outside of, or to cope with the insane adherence to tradition that the Sleythin offer. However, most of the humans here are actually reluctant to leave. The great majority of them are not Twenty-Four, nor even Borenstein carriers, and they are uncertain about the new world of human evolution waiting for them. Most humans on Sleythin speak their native language and then the Sleythin language. This has been a rather brief description of all the possible places humans live. Sleythin, obviously, live on the planet Sleythin, in the City of Refuge. For more on them, look at < Aliens.txt >. For more on any of these places, feel free to ask Yu or Cham.