END MESSAGE TEXT

Introduction 3

BEGIN DOCUMENT ATTACHMENTS

Attachment Listing

1. Planetary Location and Characteristics
2. Dramatis Personae
3. Brief Glossary of Planetary Institutions
4. Life Cycle
5. The Ages

Appendix 1

PLANETARY LOCATION AND CHARACTERISTICS

For general readers of this document, if any: Due to security concerns and in the tradition of the Seventh Convocation of Long-Lived Mobile Entities on Fostering Civilizational Resilience, the standard galactic location of this planet has not been specified.

(For Siob: I trust that you remember where it is.)

There is, strikingly, no active endonym for the planet itself. Its inhabitants refer to it only as “the world,” or, in the vocational slang of workers in the asteroid belt and outer satellites, “downside.”

The inhabitants are of engineered paleohuman stock, part of a human-origins restoration effort (~150 kya), which was repurposed for generation-ship travel (~80 kya). Local human settlement occurred ~50 kya.

At present, the entire surface of the planet is silvomorphic infrastructure—largely forests and wildlands, with no permanent inhabitants. Instead, it is used by different groups (classes of school children, hunting and paleolithic-life enthusiasts, etc.) for recreational purposes, no more than a million bodies at any one time. In addition to biodiversity and environmental stability benefits, this design ensures that in the event of a rapid and lethal total civilizational collapse (e.g., total failure of all automated infrastructure in the interior), an appropriately sized remnant of survivors with relevant skills would be physically positioned on the surface, where they would form a basis for eventual rebound.

Beneath the surface, various nations are situated in large excavations in the planet’s crust. Generally speaking, habitations are positioned in the cooler region closer to the surface, while, towards the planet’s mantle, production regions powered by geothermal differentials ensure light (via glowtubes), oxygen exchange and airflow, nutrient synthesis, etc. A given excavation functions as an almost completely sealed ecosystem, with near-total recycling of organics and energy in the nutrient flow. This flow is highly optimized, to the extent that any interruption or sequestering of resources from the flow could have serious consequences. The inhabitants have internalized the risks of hoarding, squandering, and flow blockage to the point that many of their everyday insults revolve around these taboos.

Population Statistics of referenced locations

Total population of the planet: 1 trillion

• The surface: no permanent population
• The Pole: pop. 2.5 million

• Nation of Fullbelly: pop. 200 billion

  • Habitation of Foo: pop. 1 million

    • Neighborhood of Slow-as-Molasses: pop. 50,000
  • Habitation of Stiffwaddle: pop. 300,000
  • Habitation of Temereen: pop. 125,000 (later Windswept Sheltering, pop. 20,000)

  • Habitation of Wallacomp: pop. 10 million

    • Neighborhood of Tentative Scoop: pop. 230,000
    • Neighborhood of Izist: pop. 650,000

1 I have actively encouraged this inward-looking tendency, also expressed in disinterest in interstellar travel, pursuant to separation protocols of the Gardenist school.

2 kya = thousands of years ago, measured in the planet’s inertial frame of reference