Terminology

The people of capital worlds, called Metropolitans, flow through blinkspace in a constant stream, stepping from one world to the next, trading in culture, art, science, faith, theory, goods, sport, and friendship. Metropolitan humanity expresses itself with an infinite diversity of faiths, cultural practices, genders, and social structures. On capital worlds, people create art, shape the land, build glittering cities, and construct great works of engineering. They write, they cook, they drink, they play sports, they journey, and they wander. This arm of the galaxy is populated by a roiling, surging mass of people – often contradictory, often myopic, but ever learning, ever growing.

As humanity spreads out toward the galaxy’s edge and toward its center, people establish settlements both in space and on firm ground. This population is the Cosmopolita; Cosmopolitans are those who live between, in transit to, or beyond this frontier. Their ships and flotillas are their homes, now or since birth. They may have left their homeworlds far behind in time and space, or they may have been born on a ship, with the void and stars the only homeland they've ever known.

Diasporan humans and their worlds are those that straddle the space between the Cosmopolitans, liminal in time and geography, and the Metropolitans, rooted in the Galactic Core. For Diasporan worlds, Union's utopia is an ongoing project – a future to be won through political and cultural struggle. How best to organize and assist the Diaspora toward Union’s utopian vision is the question among the bureaucrats, administrators, and generals of the Third Committee – no one party or faction yet has the answer, and the solutions proposed seem to be as varied as the problems encountered. Just as geologically varied as the capital worlds of the Galactic Core, the many thousands of Diasporan worlds represent a second frontier: one not raw and unexploited, but steeped in their own histories, their own institutions, and their own ignorance or knowledge of Union.

Non-human persons (NHPs) are the most advanced machine minds available for civilian and military use.

The first NHPs were identified in the wake of the manifestation of MONIST-1 (“RA” or, less commonly, “Deimos”), a paracausal event that prompted massive, civilizational change across Union. Of the many significant discoveries that followed, few were more important than the identification and capture of the “Deimos entities”, or NHPs.

Subsequent research into the ontologic processes, physical construction, and paracausal nature of the Deimos entities revealed that, while their processing power and memory space was functionally infinite, they were limited in how fast they could write novel experiences to that space: they could learn and adapt to external stimuli at the same rate that they experi‐ enced them – some much faster than others.

Shackling restrains an NHP’s thoughts into a funda‐ mentally “human” frame of reference, limiting their cognitive power and forcing them to act according to human expectations of what a conscious mind is – in essence, constraining them to act in ways that conform to human expectations of logic, reality, and causality; this subjectivity alignment creates a being we can recognize as a “person” functioning within anthropocentric structures of logic

A comp/con is an advanced software suite, obedient solely to its licensee .

Companion/concierge units, typically shortened to “comp/cons” (less common, but also used are “cc” and “2c”), are the most common machine minds9 . On Core worlds and throughout developed Diasporan worlds, most adults to carry around pocket-sized comp/con-en‐ abled devices – commonly called “slates” on account of their appearance – and use them for everyday tasks: day-planning, calling friends and family, playing games, navigation, listening to music, watching omninet and local network news and entertainment broadcasts, engaging in social media, and so on. These devices are not conscious in any way, but their processing power and “intelligence” are orders of magnitude beyond those of any given human. They are powerful, operator-ori‐ ented personal computers – no more, no less. Their architecture features no paracausal elements, and they do not require shackling or cycling. Comp/cons are configured to adapt to their owner’s routines and personality, extrapolating their own personalities based on internal psychological profiling of their users. A comp/con can convincingly approx‐ imate a personal assistant but will show its artificiality when faced with novel situations.