There are still so many mysteries! There are Neo-Neanderthals living in the Jezreel Valley, and those sentient clouds on the planet called Heven. There’s a priestess of the entities in the Oort who keeps turning up, and they’re always producing new wildtech on Jettisoned. The trains still run on Mars, meeting annually for a conclave no human ever witnessed. Nirrti is fighting something on the Kraken Sea . . . and who knows what lies under the ice of Europa?

Somewhere, people still watch that famous Martian soap, Chains of Assembly. Somewhere, they still drink rice whisky and read the pidgin poetry of the strange poet who called himself Basho. The robots still dream of the place that lies in the Zero Point Field . . . and the Wu Expedition remains missing.

So there’s a lot left to explore, and I might still be here for a while. All I know?

Wherever humans go, they’ll still grow flowers.

BEYOND NEOM:

AN A TO Z

A

Adaptoplant

A form of genetically modified, fast-growing bamboo. Adaptoplant is programmed to grow entire houses, complete with furnishings, windows and even plumbing. The sight of high-rise neighbourhoods shedding their doors like eyelashes in summer is not uncommon.

Asteroid Pidgin

Now often a creole. Near-universal language based on South Pacific Bislama, initially brought to space by Melanesian asteroid miners and migrant workers on Mars.

B

Basho

A poet, possibly of human origin but most often suspected of being a digital sentience of some kind, once said to have spent two hundred years as a spaceship-bound toilet purely for the experience. Sometimes referred to as the “second Basho” to distinguish from the original seventeenth-century poet and travel writer. Basho is celebrated for his poems written in Asteroid Pidgin (an oral, but seldom written, language). Of Neom, he had once written:

Wan sandroing

Blong bigtaon ia

Bae wind I kasem finis

Which, loosely translated, reads:

A sand drawing

Of a city

The wind will soon rub out.

It is generally believed Basho only visited Neom once, briefly. Evidently he didn’t care for it much.

Battle Yiddish

An ancient form of a language used for communication in some of the old wars by ROBOTNIKS.

Belt, the

Colloquial term for the Asteroid Belt.

Body-surfing

A tiny minority (or so it is believed) of OTHERS take interest in human affairs. Sometimes such Others opt to occupy a willing human’s body through their NODE, thus interacting with the material plane. It is an activity generally disapproved of by humans, but politely.

Boppers

Mutable, machine lifeforms, indigenous to the large moon Titan. Boppers come in many shapes and sizes. They are harmless, and live in the wild in the methane atmosphere. Boppers occasionally produce small, though often intricate pieces of what is now generally considered—perhaps erroneously—art.

They are said to have been seeded on Titan by “Mad” RUCKER, the terrorartist (see TERRORART).

Breeding Grounds