banker-historian: a professional responsible for emotional accounting, formalizing the story of a person or institution’s emotional states so as to optimally influence their ratings.

consensus: the aggregation of ratings and global opinion, synthesized by Far Technological agents, which allocates most rights to resources, goods and services, feed access privileges, and social status. In addition to global consensus, decisions within a family or enterprise are often made via a consensus moderation framework.

feed: the global information network, integrated directly into inhabitants’ neural experience.

feedgardener: professional who, in concert with agents, monitors, maintains, and shapes the feed.

Groon: one of the planet’s religions, focused on a theurgic entity, Groon, whom devotees are encouraged to scorn and blame, and whose mourning and remorse are redemptive.

Idyll: a facility for those undergoing ontological collapse, allowing a greater degree of behavioral freedom than would be possible in the wider world without damaging ratings, and providing emotional support from professional specialists (who are often themselves undergoing ontological collapse).

Long Conversation: composed over millennia and consisting of tens of millions of stanzas, the Long Conversation is both the collected repository of staidish wisdom and the ritualized communal act of reciting, referencing, juxtaposing, commenting upon, and extending that repository. The degree to which Vail knowledge of and involvement in this project is taboo has varied over the centuries. The project itself predates the formalization of Staids as a “gender,” and is core to Staid identity and practice.

lookup: a component of the feed; the global identity registry which establishes each inhabitant as having a unique identity, advertises that identity to others, and enables access to resources via consensus.

Kumruist: one of the planet’s religions, focused on a semi-mythical prophet and theurgic entity—Kumru, whose sufferings devotees identify with—and sacralizing biological life.

Midwives: an order of specialists, equally divided between Vails and Staids, who have the traditional responsibility for gendering babies. They have, by skillful manipulation of consensus, parlayed this limited formal authority into a much broader authority over who can reproduce and, by extension, which families are permitted to exist.

Near vs. Far History: strictly speaking, Near History is since the settlement and terraforming of the planet, while Far History is the nebulous time before, but in practice Near History means that portion of history which is comprehensible without massive cultural disorientation.

Near vs. Far Technology: though the planet is heir to—and reliant on—hundreds of thousands of years of human development, most of the cultural context of that ancient technology is lost to its current inhabitants. Thus, from habitation architecture to social nuance agents to the nutrient flow, everyday life is enmeshed in Far Technological systems which no one alive fully understands, and which sometimes behave in unpredictable ways. Near Technology, by contrast, is developed and understood locally: while more modest in scope, it has the advantage of predictability.