ontological collapse: also called “unraveling.” Characterized by extreme variance in emotion and behavior, as different parts of the self decohere and come into open conflict. There is a cultural tension around unraveling, which is considered both a healthy self-maintenance practice and simultaneously (especially for Staids) a somewhat embarrassing loss of control.

Peaceable: a professional tasked with mediating emergent conflicts and maintaining order who is authorized to use nonlethal coercive force. Peaceables are always Staids trained in emotional self-regulation. Their neural states are published and they are not permitted to act in anger, fear, or callous detachment.

polysomatic network: the deep portion of the feed which allows intracellular-level physical states to be synchronized between the multiple bodies of a single person. Bodies are flash-cloned from universal stem cells, usually in infancy, and permeated with networked nanometric replication systems to ensure a phenomenologically smooth experience of singular self.

ratings: globally published automated assessments of each individual’s history, character, and status, which inform the backbone of the economy. Strictly speaking, the planet has an agent-mediated emotional-transaction pride economy rather than a classical reputation economy, but ratings function similarly in both.

reactant: professional whose emotional states, published to the feed, inform algorithmic design and control structures. In other words, their job is to react to things.

send: the portion of the feed responsible for person-to-person synchronous communication.

Tricksterian: one of the planet’s religions, focused on a blatantly fictional folk hero and promoting irreverence and folly.

Unfeeling: one of the planet’s religions, nontheistic and monist, promoting asceticism and paradoxical catharsis.

world-of-ideas: the portion of the feed in which information and opinions are asynchronously exchanged.

1 Agents’ sentience and autonomy is constrained by design. Still, it is a matter of extreme good fortune that they have tended to enthusiastically embrace the project of a joint co-culture with the planet’s human inhabitants. People tend to assign my few contributions to maintaining this alliance much more credit than they deserve.

Appendix 4

LIFE CYCLE

Typical life cycle of planetary inhabitants, as popularly understood

0–22 years: First Childhood: care and nurturing in the enclosure of the family. The entire parental cohort typically pledges to stay together for this term. Declaration of majority is vanishingly rare, and not always honored. During First Childhood, Staids are expected to have romantic longings for other Staids, and Vails to experiment sexually with other Vails, but intergender romantic and sexual relationships are taboo.