It was impossible in creating this orientation document for Firewall agents operating on Mars to find Martians who were able to be as objective as professionalism dictates in describing their homeworld. This is unsurprising. Mars is a place of social upheaval and deepseated unrest, the locus of a long, cold war being fought between transhumanity’s past and its future. The authors, one proxy and two sentinels, editorialize a great deal about political matters on their homeworld that often should not be the concern of Firewall, even where sentinels’ individual politics might suggest otherwise.
<Jake Carter, Firewall Proxy>
They say the Earth was beautiful. Wouldn’t know; I ain’t been there. This here’s my planet. She’s cold, full of people hard and scarred, bone dry and unforgiving. But damn if she ain’t beautiful, and I wouldn’t trade her for nothing. I was born in a tuna can on a hardpan rust flat 300 klicks west by southwest of Olympus— the Amazonis Planitia, dead center of what would become the TQZ. Our nearest neighbors were a bunch of Islamic fundies, but my parents were still able to make ends meet by selling some of them bootleg shoju on the sly. There was a big town dome, but nobody lived in it save company people. The rest was given over to growing food, and all we rednecks lived in the network of cans and tunnels spread about it.
My people, and most of our town, came from Korea on old Earth, and like a lot of immigrants, the thing we held onto tightest was food. The biggest event every year was when the cabbage and chili crops came in, right around New Year’s; then mom’d put up enough kimchee to last 14 months. The other 10 months of the year we were eating unflavored tofu and calling ourselves lucky. And we were lucky. Dad and Mom were solid—didn’t get hooked on XPs or stims like half the town, didn’t take out adjustable rate mortgages on their bodies and end up in cheap synths like some people’s parents.
Even if you steer clear of the obvious traps, though, there’s one piece of fine print ought to be sequenced onto the eyelids of every ruster morph: rednecks are born fucked. My first tattoo was those last two words, to keep me mindful of it. Some years Mom and Dad just couldn’t afford the Genetic Service Packs to keep their bodies running right, and those years were tougher than others. They always found enough money to buy the GSPs for me and my brother, though. Some kids in my town actually needed asthma inhalers, if you can believe such a thing. Dark ages, right?
Every day from when I was eleven on, Dad and I’d get up two hours before sunup to warm up the buggy. It’d be twenty below just about every morning, maybe a little chillier in winter. Lucky we lived a bit north of the equator; gets helluv colder on a winter’s night down south. Actually, ain’t lucky we lived where we did, but I’ll come to that. Dad was a line tech, mostly contracting for TerraGenesis. Huge swathes of the Amazonis Planitia are permafrost, and in some places you even find sheets of ice kilometers wide a meter or so below ground. The plan in those days was a slow melt using simple solar-powered heating rods that’d grow a network of heat-conducting nanofibers below ground, like a tree’s root system. It was a big operation with a lot of melting and monitoring gear to watch over, and even self-repairing machinery needs servicing. Lot can go wrong in an extreme environment. We’d drive a few klicks, check out a cluster of gear (it all needed visual inspection; you could never trust the self-diagnostics), then move on to the next. We’d check out two or three clusters while it was still dark, and then we’d always stop in the same spot, on a low rise facing east, and watch the sun rise over Olympus Mons.
Dad never said anything, and I knew not to talk. He’d put the engine on a low idle and watch the shadows shorten for maybe fifteen minutes—a long time for a guy who got up two hours before dawn on a Martian morning so he could finish his rounds by dusk. Dad wasn’t a religious guy, but if he had a spiritual bone in him, it came out every morning right then. Olympus hasn’t got much by way of foothills like Earthan or Venusian mountains, and it’s about the biggest single object you could imagine below the scale of an asteroid. It flattens the landscape around it. Kilometer-high cliffs look like nothing, and our proud space elevator is only a tiny black thread above its caldera. Watching the morning clouds roll down its lower slopes while the sun crept up painting the Martian desert red gold, it was all enough to make you forget you were a helluv poor redneck in a ditchstop town full of XP junkies who didn’t even hold the copyrights on their own bodies. Since joining Firewall, I’ve gone sailing on Titan’s methane lakes, I’ve spent the night in a 2,000-cred-an-hour cathouse in Elysium, and I’ve stood on a planet orbiting an alien sun. I’d give all that back to see the sun rise over Olympus Mons from that vantage again just once, but now that spot is dead in the middle of the TITAN Quarantine Zone.
When the Fall came, I was twenty-seven and working as a line tech like Dad, looking after a string of ecostations around what was left of the Hellas Planitia glacier. Hellas is a huge impact basin, and it was in the transition from ice field to bog at the time. Mostly I worked at night, when the brutal cold quickfroze the bog, turning it back into an ice field, so I was awake when the first attacks hit Mars.
I didn’t have much politics ‘til that night, but the way the PC-run media lied to people during the Fall about what was really going on, lied when they didn’t have to, when people could’ve got away to safer regions if only they’d known, that was what changed everything for me. I only knew what was going on ‘cause a friend at the time—I’ll just call him Mahesh—turned me on to Radio Argosy, the n-cast the Argonauts’d been running. How’d rednecks cutting frost in a boggy crater tune in to neutrinoband broadcasts? Mahesh was an industrious guy, and you can do some crazy stuff with repurposed terraforming gear. We weren’t the only ones tuned in, and a lot of lives probably got saved that way. My fam, though, didn’t have an n-cast receiver. I’ve never found out what happened to them. All I know is when I finally made it up to Empire, the town on the Noctis Labyrinthus canyon rim that used to be the last stop for supplies before you headed out on the M-4, the western highway was barricaded. Nobody was being let through to the Quarantine Zone beyond, and they didn’t give a damn whether you had people out there.
Two things to know about the Movement: one, it’s a real crazy quilt, a lot more complex than any one group’s agenda. Two, you can tell who’s in the Movement and who ain’t by how they call it. If you’re down with B, you’re just in the Movement; nobody actually calls it the Barsoomian Movement, except in boardrooms and offworld.
There were four million people living on Mars before the Fall: about a third in each of cities, small towns, and back country. Now there’re 200 million. How’s a planet absorb that many people? If you’re the hypercorps and their PC spitboys, you could’ve settled a lot more people in the country, but that ain’t cost effective. Instead, you build bigger habs, bigger cities, establish a pecking order, and get helluv mean if anybody steps out of line. Now over half the planet lives in cities and the big towns around them. Most are either direct employees of a corp or indentures, and it’s changed life for the worse. Used to be you filed a report on your terraforming zone and the Tharsis Terraforming Office used that feedback for planning. You gave them your hydration stats, biomass estimates, local demographics and all, and if you were hitting the targets—which were sane back then—they let you be. Now the TTO is just a rubber stamp for whatever crazy plan the PC’s cooked up that month to make the city folk think they’ll get to come out of their domes some time during the lifespan of their current morph.
Which of course is dead wrong. Terraforming’s going a lot faster than we thought it’d do, but there’s a point, and we’ve reached it, beyond which you just can’t rush it any faster, leastways not without jeopardizing the climate over the long, long run. Right now Mars is a fixer-upper, but fuck it up by going too fast, and in 500 years you’ll have a stormy hellhole like Earth or Venus.
The TTO and the corps realize this, so they do stuff that’ll make it look like they’re accelerating the process with a lot of smoke and noise. Orbital bombardments near populated areas, flooding—that kind of crap. It doesn’t change a thing in terms of the terraforming process, but if you’re a nomad or living in a small town that’s forcibly evacuated, it makes a rough life even rougher. The compensatory cred from the TTO is always a fraction of what it’d take to get a new start in another town, so whole towns end up forced into the city population, where most of their kids end up being whores, hustlers, and office drones instead of farmers and formers. City dwellers, by and large, don’t care what happens to the poor dumb rednecks getting displaced by this weird dog and pony show, but if anyone makes a peep about how atmospheric density and O2 levels aren’t rising at the promised rate, they’re quick enough to blame it on sabotage by “Barsoomian agitators.”
To: <encrypted>
From: Das Frettchen
Back in the day, we’d have called the Barsoomians terrorists, and it’s not an unfair assessment. Politicians in this day and age are far too subtle to fall into such an enticing rhetorical trap, though, despite the truth of it. One can’t get away with crying terrorist at any element of the Barsoomian “movement” (and one must use this term loosely; they’re about as unified as early twenty-first century Palestine). If you do, you’ll have an army of the ignorant beating on your mesh presence—not just the actual terrorists-in-activist-garb, but a whole cavalcade of social democrats, mesh neutrality activists, and pansexual degenerates. While the thought of this should generate a frisson of excitement among those with the will to power, our present planetary authorities are not made of such stuff.
The Movement brings together a coalition of interests that’s helluv diverse, going from your radical autonomists, ruster preservationists, and Titanianinfluenced technosocialists to trade unionists, right-on progressives in the city middle class, and good ol’ boy Martian nationalists. The Movement’s got no platform, but everybody who identifies with it’s got one thing in common: a list of grievances called the Complaints. Summing up basic, the Complaints are against:
A few other issues are common cause among a lot of Barsoomians, but not all:
All in all, the Movement’s got plenty to be angry about, and every year, they get more organized. Never mind a lot of people in the Movement hate each other’s guts as much as they hate the PC, the corps, and in some cases, the League. Some supporters are actually in the Tharsis League now, mostly holding low offices or appointments, but it’s enough to make the powers that be look over their well-tailored shoulders. How it’ll all turn out, though, now that’s a poser.
Most people in the Movement won’t dick around on this point: hypercorp and government use of indentured infugees is slavery, plain and simple. It’s only in recent years this issue has caught some real traction with the masses, though, because up until a few years back, the Martian working class wasn’t big enough that free Martians were competing with infugees for work.
Those who know their history’ll tell you that citizens released from their indentures are in a place a lot like black sharecroppers after the United States Civil War. They’ve worked for years in agriculture or terraforming, and they ain’t got any opportunities in other industries … but the jobs they occupied previously’re filled by new indentures drawn from the billions-strong archives of lost souls uploaded during the Fall. The Tharsis League made up some homesteading programs such as they had in the antique United States to get people to colonize the interior, and of course the Planetary Consortium trumpets these loudly as opportunity for all. But you got limited infrastructure and transit networks in the back country. The railroads gouge everybody on rates, so getting supplies in or produce out is helluv expensive. Most would-be homesteaders wind up deep in debt, living on rented land with corp-built life support and agricultural systems.
Although anybody who’s down with B agrees that infomorph indentures should be a thing of the past, there’s a lot of debate on the fate of the people who’re infugees now. Suggestions run from building more simulspace capacity so that all personalities currently on file could be instanced as infomorphs in a virtual Earth, to producing more case morphs and letting them compete in the labor market like everyone else, to simply writing them off as dead. As debates go, this one gets pretty sick.
If you’re really damn lucky, you own your body. If you don’t, you’re like more than half the free Martian population—part of some twisted fuck’s business plan, under the heading, “Long-term Recurring Revenues.” The part I can’t even believe is that so many people on Mars, a lot of whom should fucking well know better, on account of they’re the victims of it, think this is not only okay, but desirable. People’re convinced their bodies will fall apart if they get off the GSPs, when really all you need is a few months of low-level gene therapy to correct some of the errors the corp genetic designers couldn’t be bothered to fix.
In the years between when I left home and the Fall, I put in five years planting water bears and blacking rocks, I ate paste, and I scarce cracked a beer or lit a joint the whole time. I don’t think I could ever make myself save cred like that again, and if I’d had kids, there’d’ve been no way. At the end I got the Cure, and it worked. Doubtless there’re some PC and League types who’d wanna clap me on the back after that story, say, “Son, I like the cut of your jib,” or some crap like that, and point me out as proof the system really is fair, ‘cause if I could do it, anyone could, right? Balls. Most people ain’t made like that, and they know it. People—all of them, not just obsessive fucks like me—need to own their own genetics.
What we gain from terraforming will take centuries to ripen, but in the short run it sometimes gets incredibly violent and destructive. Put aside the obvious risks from bombarding the planet with comets, and you’ve still got flash floods, heightened dust storm activity, altered wind and moisture patterns, fog, and violent hail storms coming along with the process. Some of this stuff is unavoidable, but Mars, especially down south where the land is heavily cratered, has microclimates everywhere. The most violent storms and floods’re local a lot of the time, and anyone who tells you they ain’t connected to careless terraforming is either drinking hooch made from reactor coolant or a corporate PR flack. In the Valles Marineris, you’re starting to see permanent floodings in the lowest parts of the canyonlands, too, and these are almost always the result of a call made in a planning office somewhere 500 klicks away.
People in the Movement figure the planning process has been co-opted by the hypercorps, especially since they started talking up this Red Eden project. Red Eden is nothing but a move to privatize all terraforming ops under one umbrella. In that kind of space, you end up with a system where sites for the most upheaval-prone terraforming ops are picked with nothing but cost-effectiveness in mind. If an area slated for heavy environmental modification is populated, they invoke eminent domain to relocate anybody who doesn’t want to move—almost always screwing them on land prices when paying comp, if the locals are even lucky enough to own their own land.
Terraforming’s been going on for half an Earth century now, but it’s got a long way to go. Looking at Mars from orbit ain’t too different from the view the first space probes got. Sure, there’s some green, some more clouds, big areas that’ve been blacked to up the albedo, and even a little water sparkling here and there, but the stark red terrain’s still raw enough to show its prehistoric roots. Mars is broadly divided into north and south, with big differences between the terrain of the two. The northern hemisphere is pretty damn flat, or in some places rolling, with the occasional mountain here and there. Go south, and you’ll eventually hit a cliff or scarp, some high as a few kilometers, dividing the northern plains from the south, which is older terrain, rugged, heavily cratered, and usually higher elevation. Just about everywhere you look, though, one thing’s clear: a long time ago, our planet was warmer. You can see the evidence in the deep cuts of old rivers, some of which are coming to life again, and in the chaotic terrain they left behind. And in Hellas early this spring, we got our first real snowfall ever. It was the loveliest damn thing I seen in years.
Before we really got to exploring Mars, there were those on old Earth who thought we’d be able to come out here and just walk around with a breather mask. Obviously, they were wrong. Atmospheric pressure is still way too low (meaning that aside from problems for morphs that can’t tolerate low pressure, a lot of radiation makes it through), and it gets murderously cold at night. Mars being a desert, the day to night temperature fluctuations are extreme. On a warm day at noon, it can get up to seven or eight degrees, but even on a warm night in Valles Marineris, the temperature goes down to twenty below. Splicers need survival clothing at night, and rusters need heavy winter duds. On the up side, pressure’s a lot higher at low altitudes, and it doesn’t get cold enough for carbon dioxide to freeze any more.
Dust storms’re still common, too, although the huge, planetcovering redouts we once got are rarer and rarer these days. When a big one comes, though, you batten down the hatches. In open country, dust storms can go on for days. Aircraft are grounded, you can’t see a damn thing, and even going anyplace on the ground can be impossible. Likewise, dust devils are still common, up to a klick across and a few klicks high. As the air gets thicker, these actually grow in strength and last longer, and someday they’ll be as bad as old Earth tornadoes, I hear. It’s beautiful sometimes to see three or more of these devils tearin’ up the terrain in the distance at once.
I could talk your ear off about terraforming and ecostation gear, on account of I’ve been working with it half my life, but I’ll try to keep this short and sweet. Forming activity falls into a few main categories: the big industrial stuff, offworld and orbital megaprojects (what we call “pot-stirring”), and terraculture (the stuff that goes on at ecostations).
Rubbing shoulders in the areostationary sweet spot with space elevators, swanky habs, shipyards, and such are orbital mirror arrays. Each one’s made up of four or five kilometer-wide discs of rigid foil with station-keeping solar trim tabs. They reflect additional sunlight onto the Martian surface. Individually, they don’t make much of a difference, but there are two hundred of them up there now, enough to raise temperatures just a little along the equatorial belt beneath them. New belts around the poles are planned over the next couple years.
The flashiest part of the terraforming project, though, is cometary bombardment. In the early years of forming, they were dropping any old asteroid, mainly non-minable carbon-silicate rocks from the outer Belt. The point of it then was to heat up the polar caps enough to melt off all the carbon dioxide and start the water melting, too, and for that all you needed was a helluv big kinetic impact. Now most of the objects coming in are comets. It’s a dicey operation, for sure. You get a crew of ice pushers to live on one of these things for four, five years. They build a propulsion system that uses the mass of the comet itself as propulsion mass, then keep the thing on course while it accelerates in from way outsystem.
All of these snowballs have to be a kilometer or less in diameter; anything bigger could fuck the whole planet. In the final months, they do course corrections and steer the ice so that it makes the slowest possible approach to the planet. They payoff is a giant fuck-all cloud of water and ammonia, and another big jolt of kinetic energy to melt more of the polar caps.
Nowadays, though, they’re talking about comet impacts farther and farther from the poles, and they’ve even done a few. There was a week of rioting in Noctis after the first one hit, and now it’s a political hot potato for the Tharsis League. The scientists ain’t helping. Some’re arguing in favor, some against, and it’s unclear who’s working off the facts and who’s on the take from the PC.
The same techs we wrecked old Earth with’re actually great for making Mars a better place to live. Chlorinated fluorocarbon factories are mostly automated plants that use robotic miners to extract minerals rich in fluorine, then manufacture greenhouse gases. CH4 plants use ice and the atmosphere itself to electrolyze water into oxygen and hydrogen, then produce methane and water using the Sabatier reaction. Scumyards are industrial-scale decay beds using agricultural and industrial waste products to nourish bacteria and, in the last few years, Martian termites. Mainly they crank out compost and a whole lot of CO2, which you need to thicken and warm the overall atmosphere. Blackeners are huge, rolling nanobot hives that move over open country, belching smart soot. Smart soot propagates and darkens the landscape, decreasing surface albedo so that the planet holds in more heat. Blackeners mostly operate around the equator, which makes the orbital mirror arrays more efficient. The last major industrial effort involves getting more hydrocarbon-burning vehicles out there. Buggies, flying cars, and a lot of other vehicles now run on methane. This last issue’s created some fights within the Movement. City anarchists are a bunch of bicycle freaks, and air quality inside the domes is one of their favorite things to get pissed about.
Rusters and alpiners ain’t the only transgenic life on Mars, and in fact we’re kind of behind the curve. The most successful lifeforms on Mars so far are microbes: extremophile planktons and nitrificating bacteria released in the wake of comet impacts to break down ammonia. Also doing well are water bears: microscopic animals that can survive being frozen solid. We’ve planted a lot of them to get more of an ecosystem going.
From the water bears and other extremophiles, the gene designers figured out how to sequence coldtolerant traits into a whole mess of other animals that ain’t warm-blooded and can’t carry around a lot of insulation: small insects, lizards, and annelid worms. We’ve also got some plant life, especially in the VallesMarineris, breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out sweet, sweet O2. There’s been some success with types like conifers, sagebrush, tumbleweeds, some grasses, lichens, succulents, and cacti.
All these plants and critters’re getting the liquid water they need to live in part from all the work we’ve done on melting the permafrost. You pick a promising patch, plant a field of solar-powered heating rods, and while you’ve still got an ice field at night, during the day you’ll get liquid water—enough for worms, bacteria, and plants to go on with their little lives. Meanwhile, the less-modified plants living in agricultural domes do their part. Life support systems in a well-equipped dome these days’re good enough that there’s often surplus oxygen you can vent directly into the atmosphere.
Finally, there are nanoswarms. I talked a little about blackeners, but there’re a host of other robotic crawlies loose out there working on tasks like soil aeration, breaking down rust, and “sorting” desirable minerals toward the surface through the soil and regolith. Using swarms for forming work is controversial, and there’s a law on the books (which gets ignored mostly) prohibiting planting replenishing nanobot hives in forming zones. During the Fall, a lot of swarms got subverted by the TITANs and went from aerating the soil to aerating people. The nanoecology bloc argue the benefits’re greater than the risks, but for my money I’m suspicious of them. You need to lower albedo, seed more lichens and algae. But the nano-ecologists’ve been winning this debate so far.
‘Cause of all this, the places with the highest population density on Mars are those where the effects of terraforming are being felt first: Tharsis and VallesMarineris, Hellas Planitia, and Argyre Planitia. Of course, there’s population scattered all over the planet, but large settlements have sprung up mostly where the living’s least harsh.
Tharsis is a huge plateau, the result of ancient volcanic processes we’re still working on understanding. The Valles Marineris canyonlands begin here, cutting eastward to give us a 4,000-klick stretch of terrain that’s just on the bad side of habitable. Three-quarters of the Martian people live here, mostly in settlements at the bottom of the canyons (though high enough they won’t drown when terraforming eventually floods the canyons). Here, fogs’ve replaced dust storms. Some mornings as the cold night air flows over rivers that’ve thawed from the freezing nighttime temperatures, you get immense flash fogs that can kill visibility in much of the canyons, especially further east in Eos where there’s the most standing water.
Hellas is another big project. It’s an impact basin, left over from a helluv big asteroid impact that happened so long ago it boggles the mind thinking about it. The glacier at the center—what’s left of it—is a major source of water for the settlements around it. Hellas is dotted with a dozen or so towns and a lot of smaller settlements, and it’s the heartland for the part of the Movement that concerns itself most with terraforming politics.
This is the other big impact basin we’ve put a lot of time into terraforming. It’s big enough that there are other craters inside of it. One of them, Galle Crater, looks like a giant smiley face from orbit. By all rights, Argyre ought to be as well developed as Hellas, but local politics’ve slowed down population growth a lot, mostly on account of the lousy maglev service through New Dazhai (more on that boondoggle later).
South of the equator, Mars is mostly a rugged, cratered place, and elevations are mostly higher than up north. Going along with that, the weather in the uplands can get a lot colder. Even so, there’s a lot of terraforming activity going on here, and you find little towns tucked into nooks and crannies all over the place. The deep craters dotting the landscape are like microcosms of Hellas or Argyre—tiny, tiny pockets where life can find itself a foothold. You can also find Barsoomian nomads here, but since the Fall, most’ve moved up north.
The north’s a hard land. Sure, the altitude’s lower, but for the most part, it ain’t like down south where a microclimate can take hold in a crater or canyon and give full-blown ecosystems a foothold. Terraforming work out here is gradual, done at isolated ecostations that might be 50 or 100 klicks from the next nearest station. Settlements are even fewer, so most people living out here’re the real Barsoomians—nomads.
Lot of people don’t recall, memories being short these days, but Barsoomian originally referred only to the ecostation nomads of the high desert and northern plains. It was only after the Consortium and League media started conjuring up images of crazed desert warriors and tying them in with the Movement that the Barsoomian label got applied to the Movement broadly.
Nomads working for the TTO get periodic resupplies from airdrops near the ecostations. If they’re independent, they run ecostations of their own: tiny caches of life, often camouflaged mini-domes no bigger than 10 meters across, equipped with water condensers and automated greenhouses. Nomads’ll live near one for a few days or weeks, depending on how well it’s yielding, then move on to the next. Never, ever fuck with these installations. Aside from messing with someone’s food and water supply out here being a shitthief move, Barsoomian nomads’re helluv good trackers. Raid a nomad ecostation, and like as not, they’ll find you and use your cortical stack for ping pong.
There’re two main camps among the nomads: those employed by the TTO and the independents. Independents call the TTO nomads “les esclaves.” Nomads usually run in clans of from five to twenty people. TTO clans tend to have names that sound like small companies, like Wright & Wu Terraforming or Société Lafitte, and the people in them might come from a lot of different backgrounds. Independents’re more family-minded, which makes sense on account of lots of them are related, or at least got strong ethnic and cultural ties. Some clans I’ve run into are al-Maqqari, Girard-Moussa, LeMieux, and Duverger.
If rednecks and city scum are the heart of the Movement, indie nomads are its soul. Most of them got ties to the Francophone diaspora in North Africa. As Europe froze, millions of French refugees wound up in Morocco and Tunisia, where they lived for decades before the Fall. While they were there, they mixed in with the local people, which is why you see all the hyphenated French/Arabic names. Trying to solve the refugee problem, the French government, which had a trashed country but great space infrastructure, started offering its citizens the chance to egocast to Mars as indentures. The forebears of the Barsoomians—French citizens and their new Moroccan and Tunisian families—took that offer en masse, while very few citizens who’d been well off enough to remain in France did. During the Settlement Conflict that came on the heels of the Fall, France lost any political claim on its citizens on Mars, most of whom’d worked off their indentures by that time, or the areas they’d settled. But the French North African culture stuck around.
There’re two main cultural branches: the makers and the sufis. Both speak a mix of French and Arabic among themselves, but the sufis are mostly from Morocco, while the makers’re mostly from Tunisia. Makers’ve got a lot in common with the autonomist cultures out in the Trojans and Saturn’s rings; they’re technolibertarian engineer-survivalists. Among other things, they invented the extended duty breathers everyone uses in the Martian back country—and open sourced them, which pisses the corps off to no end. As far as anyone can tell, it’s the makers who first invented the “Barsoomian” tag. Word is they got it out of an old Earth sci-fi vid.
The sufis were an Islamic sect on old Earth, but here they ain’t precisely that. They got a strong belief in helping others, and they believe the trials of living in the Martian desert purify the soul and bring the heart closer to their God. I don’t hold with religion, but the sufis make me proud to be human, while proving what a crock of shit the corp way of life is. You approach them peaceable, they’re the most hospitable people you’ll ever meet—pretty amazing for people living off barren soil in a frozen desert. I got lucky enough to watch one of their dances once, and it was probably the third most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen on this world. Piss them off, though, and you got yourself a deadly enemy. Where the makers got clever tech on their side, the sufis have … something. Firewall’s been wanting to check out the rumor that a sufi clan roaming the north edge of the TQZ picked up the Watts-MacLeod virus and shared it among their people, but so far no one’s had the temerity to bang on their door and ask them where they’re hiding their asyncs. Which is probably real wise.
Anyhow, you want to find people who hate the PC, look no farther. The lifestyle of the indie nomad’s been under attack for decades. Land use claims and attempts to bring them on as TTO employees have failed, and now the nomads got to contend with badly programmed former swarms gone rogue, flash floods, and even “misguided” orbital bombardments if they’re ranging far enough north.
In a lot of the solar system, time’s still kept based on UT (Universal Time, once known as Greenwich Mean Time—Greenwich was a town on old Earth). ‘Cause so many habs and settlements, especially outsystem, don’t have a natural day/night cycle, timekeeping gets pretty damn arbitrary. I think a lot of the Moon, being tidally locked with the Earth and with the same sidereal period, uses UT, too. On Mars, though, we got our own cycles of seasonal change with their own rhythm. The seasons have a real effect on terraforming, weather, agriculture, and day length. So with a little modification, we’ve standardized on the Darian calendar developed on twentieth century Earth by an engineer name of Gangale.
Mars rotates at about the same speed as Earth, so the Martian day, (technically it’s a “sol,” but that term never really picked up) is only 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer than a Earthen day. But the Martian year is just over 669 sols long (668 some years), meaning the seasons are maybe twice as long as on Earth. The Darian calendar splits the year into 24 months, with years beginning on the Vernal Equinox. Each month is 27 or 28 days long, split into sevenday weeks. The main change from Gangale’s original calendar is that the names of old Earth calendar months were partly kept to make the system easier to learn for colonists from Earth. March is the first month of the year, so Darian months roughly line up with Martian seasons in the same way as the Earthen months of the same name. The other 12 months are ancient Sanskrit names for the constellations of the Zodiac. So the months of the year are, in order: March, Dhanus, April, Makara, May, Kumbha, June, Mina, July, Mesha, August, Rishabha, September, Mithuna, October, Karka, November, Simha, December, Kanya, January, Tula, February, Vrishika.
The only part really trips people up is remembering how many days in each month, but it’s actually pretty simple, not to mention that your muse does it for you. Every sixth month is 27 days long, so you’ve got 27 days in Kumbha, Rishabha, Simha, and Vrishika. All the rest’re 28 days. The exception is in leap years. All of the odd-numbered years in a decade, and the tenth year of each decade, are leap years, meaning they got 669 days instead of 668. On leap years, Vrishika, the last month, is 28 days long. And being as it’s always a Saturday, people make a pretty big deal out of 28th of Vrishika parties. Best one I ever went to was in Noctis, where they call it Hogmanay and throw a big fire festival in the tablelands.
Mars, nearby stations, and more remote settlements under Martian sway use AMT (Airy Mean Time), the time at the center of crater Airy-0—zero degrees longitude on Mars. Because a second’s a second anywhere in the system, Martian clocks run to 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds before rolling over to the next day. Mars has twelve time zones, each set off 2 hours, 3 minutes, and 17.5 seconds from its neighbor. Meshed tech, including your basic mesh inserts, can track time changes when it moves from time zone to time zone. Spimes in orbital installations normally broadcast their current offset from AMT, allowing nearby meshed devices to update themselves. Orbitals that ain’t in an areostationary orbit normally use AMT for station time. Time zones don’t have names— officially they’re known by their offsets from AMT— but colloquially people’ll refer to New Shanghai time or Noctis time and be understood.
I hate politics, especially when it ain’t my politics. Lucky for me, I didn’t get asked to do a report on the Planetary Consortium, but I got a few words to say on the Tharsis League, the planet’s other big political organization. When PC oligarchs look at the League, they see a herd of agencies like the TTO put there to do their bidding and maybe voice some rubber stamp political support here and there to make things look proper. Interesting thing is, the real structure of the League is basic a mirror of the Movement. You got most of the same camps represented: city dwellers, rednecks, small town people, and nomads. But you’ve also got people with more to lose: middle management, professionals, bureaucrats, and local businesspeople. The upshot of this is, there’s helluv different factions in the League, all with different agendas, and working within different agencies.
The Council’s supposed to be a representative body drawn from all Martian settlements and populated regions. They set policy, make laws, and appoint the Secretary General and other members of the Secretariat, who’re supposed to execute all this grand vision through the League’s various agencies. Problem is, reps in the Council’re overwhelmingly from the cities, where most of the population lives, so most of them get hand-picked by the Consortium. However, the last election cycle there was a weird split in the city vote when a big bloc of moderates from Noctis and Elysium didn’t want to go along with the Consortiumbacked candidate. So now the Secretary General is Natacha Dhiagelev, formerly the rep from Ashoka. She’s screwing up a lot of Consortium plans, she’s down with the Movement even if she only alludes to it in public, and I’m pretty damn sure PC Oversight is already thinking up ways to off her.
IWA started out as a credit union and benefits group for terraforming, ecostation, and transportation workers. Funny thing is, it was meant to be a unionbusting move put in place by the League’s Consortium paymasters, but with so many lower-level IWA officials and members being down with B, it’s started to act more like a real trade union. This pisses off the PC and the League higher-ups to no end, ‘cause an org they sanctioned in the first place to keep the Movement out of their hair is now making unwelcome demands regarding better worker benefits and decreased use of infomorph slaves. Some of the wheels in this group include John Payne, a redneck station nomad up north who taught himself law and now files a lot of the IWA’s advocacy briefs and motions by mesh from wherever he happens to be that week, and Katrina Takahashi, the big union boss out of Pilsener City in Hellas.
The TTO, on the other hand, has been pretty well co-opted by the Consortium, and now they’re openly collaborating with the Red Eden project (or Red Bleedin’, as a lot of rusters call it). You ask me, they’re out to totally privatize forming work, bring it under the control of a single hypercorp entity. Right now, most line techs and ecostation workers’re either paid out of the public chest, as TTO employees or private contractors, or they’re working for small, local hypercorps. Red Eden coming to fruition’d mean everybody working for the Red Eden corp, and the TTO getting pared down to the point where all they’d be doing is cutting checks to Red Eden. Obviously IWA doesn’t like this, but they’re not the only ones. There’s a faction in the TTO itself, led by Kaki Varma, the powerful Committeewoman for Water Usage, that wants nothing to do with Red Eden (although whether Kaki’s down with B or just out for herself is a question mark).
The closest thing Mars’s got to a planetary police force, the Rangers technically got jurisdiction anywhere within 30 klicks of the surface of Mars. Unless they’re on a specific case, though, they mostly work outside city limits; city militias are violently allergic to these guys and gals. They’re also not allowed to operate in corp-owned settlements under Consortium protection without the right warrants. Rangers’re a mixed bag. Some are down with the Movement and generally all right. Others got corruption and brutality written on their faces bold as the red circle on a Japanese flag. Make sure you figure out which is which quick when dealing with them. Captain Sage Kim, ranking officer of the Elysium Rangers who patrol the periphery of the TQZ, is of the better sort. She’s caught a lot of flak for not busting up the Arsia Mons smuggling rings, and word is she’s real sympathetic to the Movement. At the other extreme you got guys like Captain Lem Boudin with the Argyre Rangers, whose department got its wings clipped after he turned a pack of police baboons loose on a group of farmers protesting high freight prices. The footage from that dust-up got shown all over the planet, and now most of the policing in the limits of Argyre towns is done by a security corp, Pecos (which I’m sure ain’t any better, but the League was forced to do something to quell the outcry).
The judicial complement to the Rangers, Magistrates are circuit-flying judges who hold court in the back country as needed. Like the Rangers, some’re good people, others not so good. Magistrates have to convene a jury when deciding criminal cases, but beyond that, they’ve got wide latitude to do as they please. A few Magistrates out there’ve gone technical from too much stress on the job, meaning frontier justice can get pretty weird.
MDOT builds and maintains all of the planetary transit infrastructure outside the big cities, including highways and flyways (but not maglev trains— those’re the bailiwick of the railroad companies). MDOT was the first agency where the Movement really started to make gains in the League, but the current director, Isaiah Xei, a grandfathered appointee of the previous Secretary General, is a stone bastard. One of his first acts was to asscan half of MDOT’s free workforce and replace them with indentures.
Mars is one of the only planets in the system with real surface infrastructure: roads, bridges, flyways, and the like. People’ve been living here long enough that it’s gotten pretty built up, which is good, because going everyplace by rocket ain’t as cheap or practical as it is on, say, Luna.
For much of the Martian population, rail is the only affordable means of long distance travel. Railroad hypercorps—Red Northern, Elysium & Tharsis, Rail Eos, and a score of others— have built maglev rights-of-way connecting cities and major settlements with polar ice mines, important terraforming stations, and the agricultural hinterlands. As on Earth in the 19th and early 20th centuries, railroad stations are the nuclei around which towns and villages spring up.
Maglev trains reach speeds of 400 kph, meaning that a train from Valles-New Shanghai takes about 10 hours to reach NoctisQianjiao or 13 hours to reach the space elevator at Olympus. In populous areas, tracks are generally elevated on heavy concrete plinths about 5 meters above ground. In open country, these give way to sturdy embankments elevated 2 to 3 meters above the surrounding terrain, with the occasional bridge or viaduct to cross gullies or allow roads through. Trains are similar in dimensions and interior appointments to old Earth rail cars. Long haul trains almost always carry a mixture of passengers and freight, while shorter runs might be passengers only. Freight may include among other things imported bulk raw materials (helium-3 and hydrogen—an important commodity for settlements in dryer areas), large or specialized machinery that can’t be locally microfactured, and perishables like produce and biomorphs. High-value commodities like qubits and antimatter are normally transported by air.
Surveillance along railroad rights-of-way is tight, and plinths and rail beds are built much more heavily than necessary to discourage saboteurs. Maintenance and security drones regularly traverse the rails inspecting them for damage and watching for intruders. Nevertheless, daring gangs pull occasional train jobs on the long, lonely stretches between settlements, and militant Barsoomians have managed to derail trains with a combination of clever infosec work and physical monkeywrenching.
Martian highways’re a mixed bag. On arterial roads in dense urban areas and on big highways like the M-1, there’s a traffic control system. Grid control picks up your license plate’s mesh broadcast, gets a destination from your car’s nav, and takes control of the vehicle ‘til you’re back in a low-traffic area. Make any crosstown trip in a major city, you’ll be on grid control for a lot of the trip. Spoofing grid control to get where you’re going faster or get manual control of your buggy back is a major pastime among hackers. They claim the system prioritizes not just official traffic like emergency and service vehicles, but anyone who’s got enough cred to drive first class. I’m sure this is true, but no one’s ever been able to prove it. Every couple years some blogger’ll try to expose the first class system, but they always come away empty-handed.
In areas with light traffic and on the long stretches between settlements, most people drive manual, but you can use grid control if you want. If you’re driving from New Shanghai to Hellas and’re tempted to nap on the way, though, don’t. Lonely back country highways’re under surveillance, sure, but that doesn’t mean anyone’s watching the feed, and it doesn’t stop desperate locals from pulling robberies here and there.
Speed limits on most city streets are 40 or 50 klicks an hour. Urban highways, the limit’s usually 150 kph, and on back country highways, it’s 200, conditions permitting. There are traffic control spimes on every street that track your speed and issue a fine, usually between 50 and 100 cred, if you go over the limit. If you’re going more than 25 over on a city street or 50 over on a highway, the system dispatches cops or a traffic drone to get you to slow down, and the fine doubles.
Way out in the back country, there’re roads with no grid control, and little or no surveillance. Usually, they’re dirt or gravel, and in some cases, they’re just an ancient arroyo bed that happened to be fairly clear of big rocks. It’s real hard to be sneaky moving around the back country in a buggy, though, on account of you’re constantly kicking clouds of rust if you drive at any speed.
In the TQZ, there’re several highways that still look drivable. Stay the hell off them. Smuggler buddy of mine tried to drive on the Romanesco, a stretch of the M-4 that’s become a wild artificial. The self-repair systems went technical during the Fall, and it started growing clusters of twisting, fractalized side roads. It’s called the Romanesco ‘cause of the spirals and the green coloration it’s started to develop. It’s not an exsurgent—but it will try to eat your vehicle and everyone inside to build more of itself.
Flyways are designated rights-of-way for flying cars. Most of these are virtual, using broadcast AR graphics to delineate lanes and show ads. In some places, especially urban zones, these are like threedimensional versions of surface roads, divided into lanes by 150-meter tall, regularly-spaced, slender spars that provide lighting, sensors, and mesh nodes. Grid control and surveillance is tighter here, especially in heavily trafficked areas, and attempts to suppress or spoof the traffic grid are contested more vigorously, with more severe consequences. Get caught fucking around in a flyway, and you ain’t looking at a traffic ticket. It’s a criminal offense, punishable by time in dead storage or indenturing. Penalties range from three to six months for speeding, to a year for spoofing, to longer terms of imprisonment for causing property destruction or injury. Vehicular manslaughter on flyways is a capital crime. Stealing back control of your vehicle or speeding on a flyway can get your car shot down in some places. In others, militia prowlers equipped with net guns and foam rubber cannons may be on alert to force vehicles down if they’re threatening populated areas.
To merge onto a flyway, you start from a merge pad—a specially marked highway lane where cars go airborne one at a time or in small, manageable groups. Except on lightly-trafficked flyways, merging is almost always a fly-by-wire operation run by grid control. Once on the flyway, movements’re tightly regulated. Lane changes, getting on, and getting off are mediated by grid control. Outside of the tunnel flyways connecting big domes, there’s nothing to keep you from swerving off the flyway into open airspace—except the cops, who get real pissed about that sort of thing. In open country and on the verge of smaller settlements, movement is freer, and there are approved zones outside settlement limits where flying cars can move from flyways to open airspace, at which point you’re on the same, much less regimented control network as planes and copters.
Flyways shut down during high winds and dust storms. If a storm kicks up, the entire system automatically brings cars down onto surface roads. If conditions are bad enough, surface grid control halts traffic on surface roads to make space for all the traffic alighting from overhead. Careful if you ever try gridspoofing to go manual during a storm; you’re like to get smashed by the grid landing a vehicle on a spot it thinks is empty.
Flyway speed limits are usually between 200 and 300 kph, up to 400 kph on open stretches outside settlement limits. This makes them a fast way to get around—but only if you got the cred. Flying cars ain’t prohibitively expensive for most people, but flyway tolls are. Rich folks who commute from private domes in Eos to Valles Center by flyway, for instance, eat seventy or eighty cred a day just in flyway tolls, and probably another twenty or thirty to park their whip for the day.
Most Martian cities’re well equipped with automation for basic maintenance of infrastructure. A lot of the gear involved in this is in the form of drones. Maintenance drones of various types are absolutely everywhere in big cities—so much so you just tend to block them out after a while, and monkeying with them is a favorite pastime of infosec people. Almost all of them got eyes, ears, and manipulators of some kind. Although the munis tend to keep a lot of their own infosec people and infomorphs watching these drone networks, they can’t watch everything all the time; there’s just too much of it. You can do a lot of damage with a temporary local takeover of maintenance drones, or learn a lot by co-opting a single one nobody’ll miss for a more extended period.
Valles-New Shanghai and Noctis were home to the offworld campuses of a number of Earth universities and research institutes prior to the Fall. Well funded and equipped, they were able to egocast tens of thousands of their own personnel to Mars. Academic infugees have fared much better than private sector employees and ordinary citizens. The practice of indentures is virtually absent in academia, and most universities have either resleeved their faculty and staff as quickly as possible, or kept them running in simulspace campuses until their endowments grow large enough to afford more morphs. (“Getting tenure” has become slang for being resleeved in a biomorph on the university’s dime.)
The University of Mars system is large and lavishly funded by hypercorp donors, but the old Earth institutions have in many cases managed to attract better minds by promising researchers greater freedom to pursue their interests. Among Earth institutions that have managed to survive in some form are: Caltech, Carnegie-Mellon, the University of Chicago, ETH Zurich, and Qinghuá in Valles-New Shanghai; and MIT, Cambridge, IIT Mumbai, and Universidade de São Paulo in Noctis-Qianjiao. The degree to which these universities maintain independence varies. Caltech, for instance, has become more a brand name for U-Mars’s honors track engineering programs. Others, like MIT, remain fiercely independent, playing various factions in the Tharsis League and Planetary Consortium against one another to avoid being overly beholden to any one entity for grant money. That said, most of them still spend a disappointing amount of time researching extremely dangerous technologies.
All this talk about sufis and makers and how fuck-all awesome the Movement is might give you the idea the PC and their tools in the League are the only bad guys on Mars. Ain’t so. Now don’t get me wrong; some of my best friends’re thieves and whores. But Mars’s got some real mean termites in the frame, too, and they ain’t all sitting in executive suites. Most of the big system-wide syndicates you might’ve heard about have their fingers (or sometimes whole fists) in Mars, so I’ll concentrate on some of the local ones.
Arsia is riddled with caves, most of them poorly surveyed on account of it’s on the fringe of the TQZ. Interdiction is shaky here, so smugglers can dare the TQZ to get rich. They’re kind of technical if you want my opinion, but that hasn’t stopped me doing some jobs with them when I was hard put for cash. Maybe as much as 80% of their business is in red market fabbers from Qing Long, which get shipped out by truck and buggy to customers. The fabber smugglers are the most professional; they got a product with stable demand. Others, especially drug and human traffickers, can be downright unpredictable and dangerous.
Thought to be based in Qianjiao, Conduit’s not really a harmful organization, but they’re sure as your shoes considered “criminal” in Martian terms. Conduit provides its subscribers a feed of open source software and fabber blueprints that’re proscribed as copyright or patent violation under Martian law. Conduit is a bunch of mutualists running tight beam transceivers out of the inner belt to create their own darknet. The receivers are thousands of baseball sized satellites seeded in Mars orbit that create a mesh with immense bandwidth. The PC wants to find the people in Conduit and put all of them in dead storage for 200 years. Some think there might be AGIs in the group, too.
These guys trade in bodies. It’s thought they got operations in Valles-New Shanghai, Elysium, and Noctis Labyrinthus. They use the Arsia Mons caves, but they’re not connected to the smugglers. Same smugglers would tell you that the few times they crossed paths with a Les Goules drop in the caves, the result was a gunfight and both sides retreating. Les Goules are very private. Stuff they deal in is crazy: combat morphs with full-body lidar implants, clones of XP stars grown from stolen genetic samples, packaged human meat for the anthropophagy niche market, and deep discount—occasionally badly-glitched—pleasure pods and case synthmorphs.
They’re flesh market loan sharks in some places, too. Solaris doesn’t want to do deals with your average redneck scum, so these bastards’ll offer you credit with your body as collateral. Miss too many payments, and they have an option on repossessing your body. Of course, this ain’t legal, but the civic authorities ain’t doing anything about it.
These guys trade in guns. The gang’s senior membership is heavily Chinese via Hong Kong and Macao, but the mid-level people on down are more diverse. The Moderates have ops in every city and large settlement on Mars and a score of buyers, mostly in the Belt, scouting for product they think they can move. Moderates mostly want to be businesspeople, but every so often they’ll pull some vicious gang shit, like murdering people who try to set up competing operations in their territories.
The back country’s got more than its share of desperate people. Most’re products of the PC’s systematic disenfranchisement of workers, but that don’t make them any less nasty. Outfits like the Dalton Gang in Argyre, the Family Sung in the Valles midlands, and the Ryukyu Uumakus on the Hellas periphery have gotten into everything from train jobs and highway robbery to kidnapping and small-time extortion. Their relations with the locals vary. The Daltons’re thugs who terrorize everyone around them, while the Uumakus are sort of folk heroes to the Okinawans in Hellas.
A lot of illegal drugs and narcoalgorithms come from a cottage industry that has just enough access to fabbers and illegal biotech to produce massive amounts of their product in situ. ‘Cause of that, Mars doesn’t have too many big drug cartels; supply is too close to the dealers. Of course, the cops constantly bust the small operators, which can make prices jump around, but it’s just ripples in a coolant pond.
<Jake Carter, Firewall Proxy>
Seen through the haze of a dust storm, the city in the caldera of Olympus Mons looks like a smoldering, half burnt cone of incense with a whole lot of ash piled up around its edges. In better visibility, you’ll see a core of tall, bright lit buildings, mostly mixeduse corp office and housing towers, peaking around the base of the space elevator. In the pile of busted architecture around it—pressurized housing blocks, industrial buildings, and tuna cans—you see only scattered lights. The souks here are dangerous, and in some places freezing and only partly pressurized. This city had six million people living in it at its height, but now the periphery’s almost a ghost town. As the atmosphere in Valles-Marineris, Argyre, Hellas, and other bottomlands started to thicken up and temperatures climbed, anybody who could afford to move did.
Then came the mass evacuations during the Fall, which cleared out most of the poorer people, too. The latter wasn’t what you’d call a humanitarian action; the Olympus Infrastructure Authority (OIA), which pretty much runs this town, had heard rumors that TITAN virii could turn people as well as machines. They didn’t want a zombie horde tearing down their precious infrastructure, but the power players in Noctis and New Shanghai wouldn’t take them in, neither. So they scattered all these poor people around the countrysides of Amazonis and Tharsis in inflatable domes and prefab modules—little better than concentration camps, really—and wished them luck.
You know what happened to those unlucky enough to have ended up camped out on the Amazonis Planitia. Of the rest, a lot died when the cheap life support in their camps failed or because of other resource shortfalls. Many of them are in dead storage or serving as indentures now—which’d be a second or even third hitch of that for some. The first wave of people who had to go through that are just finishing out their indentures these days, and they’re some of the angriest Barsoomians you’ll ever run into. Others made it through, but only some went back to Olympus. There are dozens of small towns on the Tharsis plateau and southward that started out as relocation camps for Olympian evacuees and’re now turned to farming, contract terraforming work, and cutting permafrost for ice.
I’ve got plenty of reasons for not liking cities, and Olympus is a microcosm of them all. Don’t parse me wrong; there’s some real good people there. Sussing out who’s a good egg, who’s a chronic hard luck case, and who’s on the corp take can be a rough job for those of us who understand fixing buggies and programming ecoswarms better than backroom deals and shady maneuvers. The evacs are to blame. Those who made it back here after the Fall were either tough and enterprising, or desperate and bent.
Mandarin is the most common language in Olympus, followed by English, and then a whole mess of other languages. You got a lot of people living in Olympus who just got no place else to go, so it’s a patchwork of transhumanity. Olympus has helluv people living in synths, which changes the landscape quite a bit. Walk through the souks in the Janks-Yao, and you’ll see near as many shops selling accessories and offering maintenance for synths as you’ll see restaurants and body stylists’ shops. Glamor morphs ain’t too common here, even for the upper echelons. Alpiner morphs are common, and just about everyone else wears a ruster. The harsh environment and decay of the city mean that even in welldeveloped areas, citizens’ll regularly encounter souks or walkways with thin air or poor climate control. Specialized Martian morphs are just a lot more comfortable.
Important neighborhoods here are Central, the OIA business district rising around the base of the Space Elevator; Deshengmen, the dense neighborhood of corporate housing forming a ring around Central; Zhongguancun, a huge, half-abandoned office park full of squats and on-the-down-low corp projects; Janks-Yao, a neighborhood on the periphery of the city center where a lot of working people live; and Fuxingmen, the general name for the mostly abandoned sprawl of buildings forming a huge ring outside the central city.
Fuxingmen and the abandoned stretches of Zhongguancun can be extremely dangerous. In addition to desperate transhumans, the constant research work in this area has left behind populations of wild artificials—robots that have gone feral—that are sometimes hostile.
The huge railyard for maglev trains coming and going from Noctis-Qianjiao is a section of Zhongguancun that projects deep into the abandoned section of the city. A spur line runs through the central city to the freight terminal for the space elevator, in Central.
At the mountain’s foot near the railroad is Olympus Skyport, the city’s spaceport; ain’t much going on there, which makes it good if you need a discreet flight off planet but don’t know any smugglers. The spaceport’s down below to keep a clear 15-kilometer no-fly zone between the space port and the elevator cable, for security purposes. High winds in the airspace of the caldera make it a sucky place to land ships anyway.
The OIA Police are the local law enforcement agency. It’d be fair to say I kind of hate them. They’ve beat up, robbed, and framed too many people I’ve known. Standard beat uniforms are black and safety yellow (which at least makes them easy to spot); tacticals wear OD green. Most OIA cops sleeve into alpiner morphs to make outside ops easier. Unlike most city cops on Mars, the standard issue prowler here is a small ground truck carrying a squad of four to six cops, rather than two in a flying car. High winds make flying cars impractical. The squad structure arose from the fact that when there’s trouble in an Olympus souk, the cops’re almost always going to need backup, so they travel in larger groups.
OIA Tacticals are incredibly well-trained and well-equipped given they’re living in the most dilapidated city on the planet. Reason is the space elevator and the city’s close proximity to the TQZ. OIA Tacs get issued the tools for taking down hostile war machines and swarms, and a full squad of ten’s got an infosec spec and a nanowarfare spec on it. While there’s never been a confirmed TITAN/exsurgent incursion into Olympus, the Tacs’ve seen action many times in Fuxingmen when black bag research projects got out of hand and somebody’s artificials went technical.
I said before that from the far distance, the space elevator looks like a minute black thread stretching up from the caldera of Olympus Mons. That thread’s about 23,000 kilometers long—long enough for the asteroid tethered at the far end to keep the cable pretty much taut. On their way up, the carriers on the space elevator reach speeds of about 500 kph in atmosphere. Around 200 kilometers up, where there’s practically no more atmospheric friction, they punch it up to 2,000 kph and maintain that speed for the rest of the ride. At 17,000 kilometers of altitude—aerostationary orbit—they either detach from the cable and slide into orbit for load out, or keep going, and shoot off the far end of the elevator at a velocity high enough to reach the Belt in just a few weeks, provided the launch window is right. Basic, the whole thing can double duty as a mass driver for in-system transit.
Sorry for geeking out on this thing’s specs, but if there’s one thing I can’t resist, it’s a big sexy eff-all machine, and that the space elevator is in spades. The first space elevator (on Earth) had one cable. The carrier had two big wings for picking up microwave power beamed at it by an array of sun-fueled satellites. Took forever to get up that cable; it had to be twice as long as those on Mars to reach geostationary altitude. And the jokers who came up with the thing never really had a good answer for what’d happen if something diffused the beam. The Olympus Mons space elevator has eight cables: four for carriers to run on, four configured as superconductors to act as the third rail for the carrier cable with which they’re paired. They got so much juice running along those rails, the practical max delta-V for the carriers, when you factor in the acceleration due to centrifugal force you’re getting off the planet itself, is around 14 kps. But the cables can’t handle that much friction, and I guess the people riding the carrier might be a concern as well, so ships skipjacking off the end of the cable generally only get about 9 kps—which is still pretty damned good for not burning any fuel.
The elevator never stops running, and it’s on a tight schedule, taking account of both the masses being lifted and their side effects on the structure. Carriers make the whole cable structure oscillate slightly as they travel, plus the Coriolis force drags at them as they climb, which bows the cable a bit. Schedules have to take this into account, with the result that there’re only two trips in each direction every day. There’re four cables, but the elevator’s rolling stock is a lot bigger, with hundreds of carriers ready on the ground and sitting in parking orbits near the elevator’s center of mass. Some are just barely pressurized bulk cargo containers, while others are fitted out for passengers and high value or perishable cargo. And some are actually long-haul freighters. These are the ones that skipjack off the end of the cable; they got just enough fuel in them for course corrections and decelerating at their destination.
The whole ride up takes almost nine hours. Download something to read before you leave. The passenger section on the space elevator is one of the only places in the system with limited mesh connectivity. OIA’s so terrified of anyone monkeywrenching the elevator, they actually lined the walls of the passenger compartments with double-thickness Faraday cages. You need a special permit for mesh access. Only people with serious hypercorp connections get them, and even they get watched like hawks by the onboard infosec monkeys. Then again, hypercorp big shots hardly ever travel by space elevator, unless it’s for good press.
Taking the space elevator is like taking the bus; the main virtue is that it’s cheap. You can get to orbit in five minutes by rocket, but a lot of people on Mars can’t afford that, especially if they have to make the trip regularly. Aside from the initial acceleration, the second acceleration when you leave the atmosphere, and deceleration at the end of the trip, passengers can walk around the carrier. There ain’t much to see, though. Aside from the acceleration couches, there’s usually an observation area (always helluv crowded and only faces the planet if you’re lucky); a bar with the most watered-down, overpriced drinks you’ll ever find outside a Mormon hotel in New Salt Lake; and lavs that are just big enough to skronk in if you’re a lanky ruster and your partner’s a double-jointed bouncer. Not that I’d know or anything.
A lot of the people you meet riding the elevator are those who get classified as cargo: soldiers, work gangs, consignments of pleasure pods, and anyone else whose job sucks enough that they get writ off as a replaceable part. For a while before the Fall, corps tried keeping all of their worker morphs in orbit and egocasting people up as needed. They found their psych bills going through the roof. Take a previously well-adjusted construction specialist who used to be in a biomorph and beam her up into an orbital work synth, and she’s apt to get glitchy. Then you’ve got an expensive synth using up space and resources while it malfunctions and doesn’t get any work done. Far better to acclimate your workers on the ground where psych and power are cheaper, then send them up the space elevator without having to get resleeved. It’s one of those rare occasions where labor interests and profit actually overlap.
The OIA is the government, the law, and pretty much the whole show here. At one point Olympus had a government, but in the mass exodus after the Fall, the remaining citizens voted to privatize it under the OIA. OIA is technically a hypercorp, but it’s headed jointly by the governors general of Noctis-Qianjiao, Elysium, and Valles-New Shanghai. See where the conflict of interest with running a city people actually want to live in starts? Each governor general puts four members on the Board, where they serve staggered nine-year terms. The Secretary General of the Tharsis League elects an Executive Director who runs day-to-day ops and executes policy. Right now the job’s held by Mae Xi, a lady who’s as crafty as her morphs are curvy. The Board members always take whatever position their governor general wants them to on issues, and the Executive Director breaks ties. Xi was put in by Secretary Dhiagelev, making her a real unwelcome outsider facing a lot of trouble getting things done. That said, the lady’s got a lot of power, and she’s slowly figuring out how to use it. Just hope the Dhiagelev administration’s as benign as many want to believe it is.
OIA’s biggest job is keeping the space elevator running, meaning monitoring usage and looking for signs of fatigue twenty-four-and-a-half by seven. On top of groundside ops, they’ve got a respectable orbital presence, with a fleet of tender and security ships, centered around Tether, the captured asteroid acting as a counterweight to the elevator cables.
Okay, look: these guys’re a bunch of shit thieves. Yeah, I know, they’re fully one quarter of the game as regards supply chains insystem, but that doesn’t change anything. At its black heart, ComEx is basic
just a piece of tracking software for routing supplies— morphs, metals, water, reactor mass, and anything else that still needs to be moved around physically. The people who wrote that software probably deserve to be rich and famous, but the rest of this outfit can go hang far as I’m concerned.
ComEx owns an entire square block of housing and office space in Central, and through their subcontractors, they touch well over half the traffic coming down the space elevator and hitting the maglev rails. They used to own a majority share in Rail Eos, the line that runs from the space elevator clear across the Valles Marineris to Valles-New Shanghai. Then they got greedy and started trying to use their control of the maglev line to muscle their way into a voting position in the Consortium. As y’all know, success hates company, and the PC clipped their wings with a series of sanctions. They ended up having to sell off Rail Eos to stay afloat, and now the majority share in the railway is owned by the Consortium itself. ComEx and the OIA hate each other; the PC uses OIA to keep ComEx in line. ComEx relies on their own security forces in their facilities and on the yards, since they don’t trust the OIA cops. I’ve known black bag people who owe their entire livelihood to the efforts these two corps, their subsidiaries, and their business partners make at screwing each other.
ComEx and its business partners own helluv infomorphs and indentures in clanker synths. They’re alleged to’ve arbitrarily extended the contracts on hundreds on indentures to save cred after the Rail Eos fiasco, but all the lawsuits by Movement lawyers on this are just so much pissing into the wind, if you ask me. The rumor that the ComEx core software itself keeps emerging into consciousness and having to be reset so that it stays below the threshold is a lot more interesting. But that one ain’t been confirmed.
<Das Frettchen, Firewall Proxy>
At the eastern end of the Valles Marineris canyon is an immense basin called Eos. In a few centuries, it will be a sea, but in this day and age it is the most densely settled part of transhumanity’s heartland. At its core, on a mesa that will one day be an island, is our utmost city: Valles-New Shanghai. From a cluster of rust-frosted tin cans to a smoking brothel she grew, till the dome slid over her like the nictitating membrane over a snake’s eye. She is my broken lady, an aching demimonde held together by the glittering prosthetics of money and nanoglass. She is my love and my curse, my Chinese box, my thousand year egg, delicious and awful. There is nothing—nothing—envisaged in the minds of either angels or demons you will not find under her five domes and the frankincensed eaves of her souks.
Thirty seven million souls—yes, I said souls, reprobates—teem in her boundaries. Half are slaves, the rest whores. I’d rather not sound flippant, though, so let me be clear: indentures are nearly as common as ferrous oxides here, and one in five people is clanking around in a robotic half-life. Another one in five are pods—meat lollipops whose innate humanity ends at their lizard brains. The opportunity for our adversaries to exploit fifteen million poorly protected cyberbrains is one of those things I enjoy losing sleep over.
New Shanghai is a polyglot city, and almost any language that survived the Fall can be heard here if one waits long enough. The most spoken languages are English, Mandarin, Wu, and Arabic, with substantial populations also speaking Hindi, Urdu, and Portuguese.
New Shanghai proper, along with Little Shanghai and Valles Center, stands on a high bluff overlooking the meeting of two rivers, the Xi and Monongahela, where they merge into a third, the Nanjing. All three are shallow, with slow currents, and they run at the bottom of deep cuts crisscrossing the chaotic terrain of the mesa. Across the rivers, at slightly higher and lower elevations to the east and north, respectively, rise the domes of New Pittsburgh and Nytrondheim. The domes are linked by massive transit conduits carrying highways and commuter trains (the Valles-New Shanghai Transit Maglev, or just “vi”). Above them are flyways demarcated by massive beacons on tall aerial spars hundreds of meters high.
From the periphery of the domes to the river banks spread the maze-like souks, a dense network of covered walkways, arcades, streets, and tramways connecting myriad pressurized buildings ranging in size from arcologies to the dilapidated tin can modules of the slums. Most Martian cities have souks, but Valles-New Shanghai’s are the archetype. Almost all buildings have black or darkly colored roofs to capture heat from the weak Martian sun. At night they are lit with a riot of glowstrips and, when one comes closer, AR graphics, either displaying advertisements or marking landing pads for small aircraft. Inside the souks, the arcades are filled with a river of transhumanity day and night, and the aromas of cooking food, orbital hashish, and sex waft out from the open fronts of eateries, gambling dens, and brothels. It’s as if all the filth and glitter of the redlight district of Amsterdam, the hutongs of Beijing, the squats of Montreal and old Mumbai, and the bazaars of Marrakesh had all come together on one endlessly twisting byway.
Valles-New Shanghai grew from the colonization efforts of several major Earth power blocs, and the architecture and culture of the five domes still reflects this to some extent. Originally, of the three oldest settlements, New Shanghai was Chinese, Nytrondheim European, and New Pittsburgh American. Valles Center was a purely corporate enterprise, and Little Shanghai was built after the Fall.
Bisected by the artificial River Ares, the massive dome of New Shanghai is a temple to gleaming excess. It is our Manhattan, our Constantinople, our Babylon. At its center lie Zhongshan Road and the Bund, a brickfor-brick recreation of the famous old Shanghai waterfront. The hypercorps love maudlin public displays of nostalgia like an infomorph broker loves a skilled engineer with no backup insurance.
The Customs House at Number 13, the Bund, houses the Consulate of the Planetary Consortium, Mars. Also located in buildings along the Bund, or further down Zhongshan Road, are the central administration of the Tharsis League, which doubles as City Hall; the Tharsis Terraforming Office; Rail Eos; the consulates of Noctis, Elysium, and other large Martian settlements; the embassies of the Lunar-Lagrange Alliance, the Jovian Republic, and the Titanian Commonwealth (the latter two right next door to one another—strong indication that God has a sense of humor); the Extropian trade mission; and several influential social clubs, including the British-style Shanghai Club at Number 2. An address on the Bund is some of the most expensive real estate in the solar system. One can tell a great deal about both the status and the mindset of a hypercorp by its digs here. The most powerful and ostentatious, including Fa Jing and Direct Action, occupy entire buildings. At the same time, several of the most prominent hypercorps—including Cognite and Solaris—have nothing more than a single secure conference room rented in a shared building. It should go without saying that security along the Bund is some of the tightest in the system. One can be accosted by plainclothes officers doing ID sweeps at any time, and keeping the riffraff out is a major side occupation.
The rest of New Shanghai is a picture-perfect grid of arcologies, parks, and housing towers. The architecture varies a great deal. Outside of the Bund, many of the major buildings, particularly the arcos, mirror the blocky, monumental New Imperial school of twentyfirst century China—a style beside which twentieth century Soviet bloc buildings would seem like elfin confections. North of the Bund on the east side of the river is Weiming Prospect, a neighborhood of mansions and row houses expensive enough, and in some cases showy enough, to have made a Russian oligarch blush. Other notable neighborhoods include Ninjinsky Square, a decadent gallery and theater district; Athenaeum, home to the University of Mars; and South Pudong, a neighborhood with much to recommend it if one enjoys haute Szechuan cuisine, high stakes mah-jongg, and meetings with highly placed triad bosses.
If abuse of neon lighting may be taken as an indicator of how low a population’s morale and aspirations have fallen, then Little Shanghai is perhaps the most desperate place in the solar system. The population of pods and synths is highest here, at times seeming to make up half the press filling Little Shanghai’s sidewalks. Pimps, narcoalgorithm dealers, and sharks ready to loan fast cred with the lendee’s body as collateral crawl the streets in cars whose tawdry glow and swirls of AR graphics compete with the garish, lascivious signage overhead. Beyond the street grid and tramways, there is virtually no design to this place. The buildings are in a riot of styles and intimidatingly dense, a play gym for some of the best parkouristas in the system. The roughest and most sprawling of Valles’s souk neighborhoods—the part of my city that may most clearly be called a slum—wraps around the foot of this dome like the coiled insides of a mitochondrion, filling the space between the transit conduits connecting Little Shanghai to adjacent New Shanghai and Valles Center.
The bars, red market augmentation parlors, and massage parlors here make no bones about what they are, standing in stark contrast to the clinical glamor of the city’s other quarters. Like the catch grill on the drain of a slaughterhouse floor, this quarter collects the city’s dregs—anarchists, scum, bohemians, and addicts—for easy clean-up. I recommend aggressive AR filters, an anti-nanowarfare package, and a breathing mask in this neighborhood. Judging from the occasional deranged behavior of some of the residents, the corps, the syndicates, and perhaps entities we know not of use this unfortunate quarter as a petri dish for memetic warfare, attempts at creating their own basilisk hacks, and airborne trials of designer biochem. Note also the storefronts that sometimes open up offering an exciting new product on easy terms, only to be gone in a week. Little Shanghai has the ugly marks of a mass experiment on transhuman kind written in its seams and pores.
The criminals operating here are mostly garden variety triad scum and local gangs who war constantly on one another, but one criminal group stands outside the usual fray. The Moderates arms syndicate is well entrenched here, and they’re a law unto themselves. They walk and talk like glossy Nytrondheim advertising directors, but their heavily armed reprisals against gangs that cross them are savage and leave no survivors.
Perhaps the most sterile and boring quarter of the city from an aesthetic standpoint, Valles Center is nonetheless one of the most interesting, as this is where many of the hypercorps hide their secrets. While most of the corps have a conspicuous presence in other parts of town, it is in the anonymous office parks of Valles Center that many of their private networks, design centers, and engineering labs are located. The painfully monotonous design of the place serves another purpose: security. Very few people live under this dome. The streets and tramways are crowded with commuters during rush hours and lunch time. The rest of the day, foot and vehicle traffic is incredibly light, relative to the rest of the city, and at night the streets are virtually deserted. This makes keeping the area under tight surveillance nearly idiot proof, which is how the corps like things. Meanwhile, the detestably uniform building designs mean that when someone’s ill-advised nanowarfare project gets out of control and breaks half a block down into its component molecules, rebuilding things so that they look exactly the same three days later is a relatively simple matter.
At the center of the dome is the Exchange, a complex of massive office towers and very expensive housing that is the trading center for much of the Martian securities and commodities trade. The three tallest of these, known together as the Trident, are the tallest buildings on Mars; they extend 3 kilometers above the dome, affording well-heeled occupants a stunning view of the Eosian countryside. Although trading is an entirely mesh-based activity, the trading houses still cluster together for social reasons. Also located in the Exchange are several of Valles-New Shanghai’s most prominent law firms; the current cock of the walk is Chen-Boltzmann-Marcos. If there is any proof of karma at work in the universe, it might well be the number of pre-Fall lawyers slaving away as infomorph paralegals for these firms.
The Burgh, as many call it, is built over hilly terrain on a higher level of the mesa. It is not the most practical site, but it has a commanding view of the rivers and the other four domes below—typical choice for the Americans in the waning days of their empire. New Pittsburgh is a solid mass of metal and smoke, with an imposing skyline that peaks toward the center of the dome with the Althauser Rocketry building, corporate seat of the powerful Althauser family (if there was any golden age in this city, it was when Goddard Althauser was governor general; but that was long ago). The architecture is glass, steel, and Martian basalt, weirdly evoking a twentieth century metropolis less than half a kilometer from what is otherwise a city of bright, new constructions. Its parks and sidewalks sit at the bottom of canyons of concrete with fast-moving one-way flyways above, always seeming perilously too close to the buildings. Fortunately, there isn’t much in the way of wind shear in a Martian city dome.
This is my favorite part of town. The climate of the dome is extravagantly humid, tuned for frequent drizzles, and one hears English spoken with comforting regularity. The after-work pubs in Burgh Center pour a variety of American-style microbrews, and one can watch an ice hockey match at Rail Eos Stadium four months out of the year. The game is only invigorated by the low Martian gravity, unlike football, both varieties of which I now find impossible to watch with any enjoyment.
Unlike Valles Center, the Downtown area is mixed use, with both corporate offices and a great deal of high-rise housing; thus one finds a great many groceries, simulspace cafes, clinics, and pet stores. Although this is true of Martian cities in general, people in this part of town in particular are absolutely mad about pets; walking a dog is a display of wealth and resources. Cats and more exotic animals are equally prized, though not as status symbols. Despite all of our successes with transgenic animals, to the best of my knowledge transhumanity still hasn’t managed to develop a cat that will put up with being walked.
The Yellow Bridge, a massive structure of arched girders, is a major public gathering place, spanning a wide public reservoir (Allegheny Public) placed for climate regulation between downtown and the residential district east of it. A lower deck carries four lanes of traffic on an arterial road. The upper deck is a foot and bicycle bridge that puts me in mind of the Charles Bridge in old Prague. South of downtown is mostly residential. North and east lie a combination of small research labs and microfacturing facilities. Much of Valles-New Shanghai’s ground-based industry is concentrated here, with hundreds of 3D copy stores, garages, fabricator shops licensed with blueprints to fab certain goods, and even artisan workshops using pre-fabricator construction techniques. Outside the dome, the rest of the mesa is taken up by the groundside operations of Althauser Rocketry and by Valles Skyport, the city’s primary spaceport.
I am not one given to self-indulgence—virtual immortality, in me, has produced a certain asceticism—but when I’m in the mood for it, gluttony is far and away my deadly sin of choice. One can fake it with a fabricator, but if you prefer your food cooked by a human (or a pod, at least), Nytrondheim is the only place in the solar system where one can breakfast on ouitsmijter, lunch on crepes or croque monsieur, dine on tapas, and finish off over solid, brown beer in an honest-to-God-and-the-King English pub. It makes continuing to live worth doing, even though on the way one is assaulted with a haze of AR graphics inviting one to various scandalous and anatomically improbable entertainments, the beratement of Marxist Barsoomian street agitators, and a profusion of video walls and ads for new vidgames and XPs that make old New York’s Times Square look dim and staid.
Aside from being a place where one can eat well, Nytrondheim is the city’s entertainment and media district, and at night it is swarmed by Valles-New Shanghai’s glitterati (and also-rans) as they flit from theaters to chic nightclubs. Many of the buildings here are fine examples of the European Genomist style that developed just before the Fall. The style views buildings as organisms whose shapes develop from a sort of architectural DNA rather than an overall design; many of them look more grown than built. A genomist building does not so much have a ventilation system as it breathes, and some of the buildings may even be observed to have slow, gentle movement to them. The style and the construction techniques underlying it were strongly influential in the development of newer organic constructions, such as Hamilton cylinder habitats.
Experia, Boba, Traumwerken, Savage, Red Five, Arnault-Kieselhurst-Patrick, and a host of other media companies and ad agencies have their headquarters or local offices here. Every one of these blood drinkers bears watching. Their interest in AGI,
singularity forecast simulations, memetic warfare (in the guise of viral marketing), and repurposing old military intel and even TITAN technologies for gaining greater market penetration makes them incredibly dangerous.
Order, such as it is, is maintained by the Valles-New Shanghai People’s Militia (called the PMs on the street and the VNSPM internally and in city government). These thugs are the city’s main police force, with jurisdiction extending through all five domes and into the surrounding exurbs. In terms of professionalism and restraint, they rival the LAPD tac squads turned loose during the Second Watts Riots on twenty-first century Earth. Apathy and bloodthirstiness make strange bedfellows. The VNSPM shows a great deal more discretion when policing the wealthier neighborhoods, with large plainclothes units assigned to areas like the Bund and Valles Center.
<Moxie Harper, Firewall Sentinel>
Aside from Firewall, I’ve got two jobs, and they overlap nicely. One is cool hunting, and the other is being a cab driver. For both of these, I like the Qianjiao Skyport run. You get to see all these trim Loonies coming in, and glam types off the orbitals. Even more interesting are the ship crews. You want to know about rolling the micrograv life in style, check out an icepusher crew some time. They look like gypsy authentics after a closet collision with Uranian freebooters.
Skyport’s the biggest sprawl of elevated flat ground clear of the canyon walls they could find, just north of the Qianjiao dome. Hit the flyway from there, and you’ll get a great view: the huge domes of Qianjiao on the northwest bank of the River Noctis; Noctis City on the southeast; and the souks, trains, and roadways in between. Three immense bridges span the 200-meter width of the river, but rather than just being road or rail, they’ve been built upon, so that when the river freezes solid at night, the light from the souks above twinkles off the ice. Above you is the endless curve of the canyon walls, broken only in the far distance by the Cut, a massive ramp on which trains and road traffic climb the two kilometers from the valley floor to the Tharsis plateau. Here and there on the canyon rim are blinding points of light— mirror arrays angled to point more sunlight at the city’s domes and the river. I recommend following the warning your entoptics will flash at you to not look directly at them for too long. Stretched out around the city are the Noctis Tablelands, a chaotic terrain of small mesas and weird hoodoos intersected by deep alluvial cuts.
New Shanghai’s big, and Elysium’s glitzy, but Noctis is where we get shit done. It’s a pricey place to live (hence my two jobs, not counting Firewall), and this town has a higher proportion of people in biomorphs than any of the big cities on Mars. The crazy landscape surrounding the city is an attraction, but the chance to strike it rich in the Martian design industry is a bigger one. Within the domes, and even the souks (which are better kept than in other cities), Noctis oozes design from every micron of matter. You won’t see even a meter of chaos in the street plan here; the entire street layout and land-use scheme was meticulously drawn up by the famous Dutch urbanists Enckl and Vonderhaar. Where the streets twist charmingly, it’s because they’re meant to, and where they don’t, they’re a perfect grid. The duck pond in the city park is also a rice paddy—worked by the ducks, with just a little help from agriculture bots that look like mossy logs when they’re not working. Grip loops and posts on the Metro use active ergonomics to reshape themselves to the hand of any rider who grabs onto them. My taxi has special footrests that fold out to be comfortable for people with prehensile feet (added those myself; neo-hominids love ‘em!). That’s only a small sampling, and it’s the result of 13 million transhumans constantly, obsessively redesigning their environment and all of the objects in it.
Noctis has a lower population of synths and a little higher population of infomorphs than other Martian cities. Partly this is because there are so many AI and robotics firms here (RiseRobots, Tetsuo, and O’Connor are notable ones). Many of the jobs that might be filled by infugees in synths elsewhere are performed by expert systems in robotic bodies here. Also, using synths for menial labor isn’t tasteful here, unlike in New Shanghai, where apparently it’s okay to show what a big swinging member you’ve got by keeping a staff of liveried synths.
The top languages are English, Hindi, and Bahasa Indonesian. Like anyplace, there’s a strong Chinese influence, but a lot of Europeans ended up here, too; you’ll hear more German and Dutch spoken in Nieuwedam than anyplace else in the system. Seriously, have you heard Dutch? It’s so fucking cute; it sounds like a made-up language.
This is a city of industries and interests divided by neighborhood. You’ll find entire sections of town devoted to one or another type of microfacturing, retail, or design. The reason is mostly social; density spreads ideas just as well as diseases. Streets are often very narrow in the older parts of town; early life support policies here were complemented by strong anti-sprawl laws and the aforementioned meticulous planning. Getting around by car can really suck unless you’re rich enough to own a flyer, but every major street is served by the Noctis Tram (sometimes called the Night Train). Arterials either have tracks running down the center or overhead rails strung from pylons; the cars are designed to operate either on the ground or suspended, depending upon traffic engineering and the geography of the neighborhood. Both domes are hilly—they needed all the flat ground for the Skyport—so the tram takes some crazy turns.
There are bicycles everywhere. Half the city gets around this way; even corp execs have gotten into it. Just about everybody has the same bike: the ubiquitous beat up, black Qianjiao fixed gear. Few have brakes, which is fine once you get the hang of it, because doing a skid stop is easy at .36 Gs. You’ll see some crazy configurations on the street from time to time—pennyfarthings, stacked-frame recumbents, unicycles with 3-meter seat posts—but you’ll never see them parked on the street. In Noctis, everyone is a bike thief.
When parkour really caught on, shortly before the Fall, the city designed a whole series of rooftop courses that crisscross the city. Real, hardcore parkouristas think these are a joke, and the fad for them waned, so that they’re now little-used. But they’re still there, and they’re still a great way around town for a decent freerunner. Even better, people tend to forget they exist.
Kledingsbrug is the center bridge. The lower deck carries a suspended tram line and the QB4, the arterial bikeway connecting the two domes. The souks and arcades above and below are the garment district, stretching from the headquarters of the prominent Galliato fashion house astride the bridge entrance in Noctis to the Dumont Building in Qianjiao, a massive retail and microfacturing complex housing hundreds of independent clothing companies. In between, you can try on just about anything, from club wear made solely of AR graphics to one-morphology-fits-all knitwear designed to be worn by both bipeds and uplifts. On the high end, you find Lunar haute couture priced so ludicrously that it makes me throw up a little in the back of my mouth. At the other end of the scale, you’ve got designs from the Trojans and Main Belt spread out on rugs at street corners, sold by vendors who care more about your anarchist rep than your cred (although they still want your money; the only free things in this town are Fe02 and bad advice). Kledingsbrug is probably the hottest daytime social spot in town. Whether you’re made of glitter or pond scum, the garment district is the place to make connections.
Renrakubrug is the southwest bridge. It’s a tech bazaar with a serious nerd bent. High precision 3D print shops, augmentation parlors, and security consultancies jostle for space with vintage part shops, data archeology specialists, and pricey boutiques selling geek-oriented Earth artifacts like comic books, toys, and antique game consoles. If you want a truly surreal experience, there are even a few recreations of early twenty-first century maid cafes, mostly peopled by creepy gerontocrat otaku and their protégés. Some pretty shady tech moves through here, as well, although major weapons deals and the like usually go down out in the privacy of the tablelands.
Biobrug (pronounced “bee-oh-brug;” non-English speakers have no idea why this is funny, so no smirking at your hosts) is the showcase for Qianjiao’s third big export: biodesign. Need a tiny robot with a microbial fuel cell stomach that lives off the chewing gum and crisps people drop in the back of your taxi cab, aquarium fish that tweet you when their water needs changing, or neon legwarmers that purr and glow green when your date rubs your leg? Yeah, Firewall agents can be frivolous with their cred, too; I got all this stuff on the Biobrug. I’ve also caught a strain of the common cold engineered to dodge basic biomods, nearly had my face eaten off by a school of land piranhas that got out of their cage, and been harangued by a seven-foot annelid with a voice synthesizer module. (Want some local color? Wiki “Feng the Worm” some time. Do not give him any handouts; he’s been using the “need spare cred to turn myself back into a biped” story for years). The rumors that Les Goules have a big operation in the market are exaggerated, although if for some reason you want to do a deal with them, it’s a good place to find them. They definitely have fingers in the pie here, but they neither run the place nor do they have any front businesses hiding a large operation. Not enough space; too much surveillance. Their black kettles are out in the souks.
On the southeast bank of the River Noctis is the larger of the two domes, Noctis City. Noctis holds slightly more than half of the population. Landmarks here include the huge Centrum Park at the dome’s center; Watertown, the financial and media district; Gastown, the entertainment district, which wraps around the Noctis end of the Kledingsbrug; and the maglev railyards. Also located here is Pembroke Gardens, a working-class neighborhood reputed to house a large number of Guanxi front businesses, including darknet facilities and illegal fighting pits where combat morphs square off against weird transgenic creatures created across the river. Noctis has one neighborhood, Tito, that’s all TTO offices, half of them empty since terraforming efforts shifted south and east. These are in a district housing a lot of other League offices and infrastructure.
Qianjiao houses the garment district, centered on the Dumont Building; Kuypers-Lalley, a dense neighborhood where a lot of design and engineering firms have offices; Osiris, a neighborhood in Qianjiao centered around Osiris Medical Center; and support facilities for the nearby Skyport. Qianjiao also hosts all of the major academic institutions in the city, with the exception of IIT Mumbai. Landmarks here include Wizard Alley, a red light district; Peg Towers, a famous block of reconfigurable modular housing and shops that look like stacks of children’s interlocking blocks in bright, primary colors; Bleeker Straat, a busy, partly subterranean artery lined with microfacturing shops; and Tufte Square, an open-air market in KuypersLalley centered on a statue of a famous twencen infotect. The TTO’s ops center is on the outskirts of Qianjiao, facing the M-4, the highway running up the Cut toward Olympus.
The NQPD is one of the sanest on the planet, which is to say they just might try to ascertain if you’re doing something wrong before they cuff you, slam you to the street, and beat up your weird-looking friend who happened to be standing nearby. Basic it’s got to do with economics: police brutality exists in inverse proportion to the number of poor, desperate people needing to be kept in line, and our city happens to have fewer poor people. Standard beat uniforms are blue and black. Tacs wear dark gray urban camo. NQPD tacticals rival the OIA Tacs in the shiny toys department, but they’ve got no experience equivalent to the OIA’s patrolling for wild artificials in Fuxingmen. This wasn’t always how it was. The old NQPD chief, Brighde (“Bridey”) Sheets-Patel, used to send the tacticals on regular scout patrols of the TQZ periphery. She had the job under a mayor who was beholden to trade unionist elements of the Tharsis League. Her replacement, Jad Singh, is a PC man through-and-through. He adopted a policy of leaving the TQZ to the military and the Noctis Rangers (the League ranger department for Noctis Labyrinthus). NQPD tacs theoretically have the tools to contain an exsurgent outbreak, but they might not now have the needed experience.
Big Martian cities have so much going on that a lot of residents have felt the need to fabricate some fairly rigid style expressions and group mores to stay sane. I don’t blame these people; life’s a confusing cup of scum. It pays to know the protocols for working with different groups, though, because all the rep in the world isn’t gonna get your foot in the door if you don’t understand why people are doing what they’re doing.
Clades aren’t factions; they don’t have the wide appeal or political clout. However, many clades line up with one or more factions. Tibetans, for example, tend to be either autonomists or reclaimers. Some clade members are very secretive, though. Members of fabber undergrounds, for instance, don’t trumpet their presence in the RNA network. Being in with a clade can help out with networking inside a faction that’s got a lot of people from that clade in it, or it can hurt if an antagonistic clade is well represented.
All of the following cultural clades can be found elsewhere on Mars, but many of them sprang up or found themselves here in Noctis.
Like you might expect, a lot of people have latched onto one or the other old Earth cultures as a way of having some norms for behavior. Often these are groups that had some kind of outsider status on Earth. Interestingly, most authentics don’t really care whether you have a bona fide background with their clade (be that through ethnicity, family history, or the like). If you’re running their memes, and you’re running them right, you’re accepted, because it’s the stabilizing cultural familiarity that they’re after. One can’t pose, though; an authentic walks the walk twenty-four-anda-half by seven. I already mentioned the sufis among the Barsoomian nomads. Some other authentic clades you might run into include Roma gypsies, tinkers, Jews, Lunar Mormons, Technotologists, urban primitives, Ismaili Muslims, and Tibetans.
Bike vs. BuGGY In Qianjiao, in the smaller El Barrio de la Ciencia, cars are forbidden. Can’t tell you how many drunken ride home fares I’m missing out on because of the kids in this neighborhood; it’s a dense neighborhood. Ciencia’s the center of the Bike vs. Buggy meme. I can’t decide whether it’s a fad, a political movement, or just a good wholesome urge to pedal in large groups so that you can check out lots of other people’s butts. Supporters usually talk about the hit to air quality inside the domes from hydrocarbon vehicles, the benefits of exercise, and the benefit to our psyches from a reduction in traffic noise. Whatever; it’s taken root. The streets in Noctis-Qianjiao teem with bicycles. If you have to, say, leave someplace quickly, possibly while being pursued, do not rely on a car in this town.
You’ll end up doing eight to ten in dead storage for organic damage on the cyclist who you will hit. On the other hand, bikes can be a fast and discreet way to get around. The whole city is designed for them to get around quickly, and traveling in a big pack of other bikers (paths tend to be fast-moving but crowded) gives you some anonymity.
Bioclubs are social and technical societies for people interested in designing transgenic organisms. Most members of bioclubs aren’t professionals, they’re cab drivers or librarians or something. But most of the equipment involved is easy to get and cheap, and everybody remembers a few tricks from their high school genetic design classes. People in bioclubs treat genetic design like it’s arts-and-crafts time; they make organisms that are interesting rather than being useful. These can now be found all over town, but the first ones seem to have come about from bored medical personnel trying some things out off-duty. For a while, bioclubs operated very openly, until (the rumor goes) a member of a club in Gastown accidentally engineered a microbe that emitted a virulent airborne toxin. The stuff got into the ventilation system of his apartment and nearly killed 28 of his neighbors. Now, while not illegal, they’re a lot more underground.
The fabber gangs, on the other hand, are definitely criminals by the city’s book. Started by engineering students in Qianjiao, fabber gangs aim to create private, unrestricted fabricators, able to run open source blueprints. Then they want to put them in the hands of anyone on Mars who wants one. The hitch, of course, is that this is totally illegal, and if any of them get caught, the authorities are going to lock them in a room and throw away the room. Fabber gang members have workshops in their homes or, if they’re lucky, in no-tell rental buildings they’ve anonymized. About half the group are hackers and infosec people whose job is to keep the project hidden, while the other half are tinkerers and engineers of various stripes. They’re not interested in selling fabricators; this would only risk compromising their operation while they perfect the models they have. Fabber underground-built fabricators often malfunction, but they have two major advantages over normal fabricators: they emit very little energy, making their operation difficult to detect, and they don’t keep any internal log of what they’ve built.
<Violet Perdido, Firewall Sentinel>
When I came back from the dead, I took up work as a whore. I had other choices of employment, but none of them were interesting. Do you know what coming back as an infugee is like? They put you in a simulspace and send you to job interviews. There is a noxiously bubbly social network involved in the process, as well as various skills assessments. In the end, a company rep sits you down and tells you how hard they’re going to fuck you. Sign on the dots, or back to dead storage for you, my lamb. I looked at my menu of choices. Actuary. Paramedic. Psych Liaison. Surveillance Monitor. “Adult Entertainment Spec” had the shortest term of indenture. Could the choice have been simpler?
It amuses me that Elysium is a crack in the ground. Coming in on the train, one doesn’t normally glimpse the scope of it. One has to be flying. Hyblaeus Chasma is an immense fissure, ten kilometers across at its widest. Covering the canyon rim in a great arc are thick panes of glass and water, held in place by a framework of supports styled as Victorian ironwork and pillars dropping all the way to the chasm floor. The canyon is compartmentalized like a ship to forestall decompression in an emergency. Walls of more faux wroughtwork and glass panes with hatches here and there to allow traffic through stretch from wall to wall and floor to roof. To the west, there is a final wall, and then the fissure opens out into the wide basin occupied by West Elysium, a great network of souks, mini-domes, and surface buildings.
By day, the city is blue, green, earth tones. Busy people fly to and fro like jeweled birds, selling sin and collecting its wages. On pleasant days, hypercorp luminaries and politicos stroll the Plaza Dei Cigni in Palazzo, conducting their business in the open air via mesh. By evening, Elysium is red and black. Its streets breathe the night people like opium smoke. If one walks around Chinatown at night, the assault of AR graphics, chat requests from hustlers, designer pheromones, visual sex memes, and transhuman awfulness/ loveliness is unrelenting.
Sure, there’s some out there who looked at the project of Elysium and said, “What is Zevi thinking? Zevi is crazy building out there.” Mes amis, nine million hustlers, dreamers, and beautiful people live here, because they realized what I did: in an atmosphere this thin, good old solid common sense sublimates into a gas quick as dry ice on the 4th of Mesha. Inspect a topo map; I’ve already built a beach house where the water line will be in 200 years. And in the mean time, my city is fucking sexy.”
—Zevi Oaxaca-Maartens, CEO of Experia, in an interview with blogger Olivie Ndembe
Skin. Red or white, young or not so, this town is positively devoted to skin. You don’t see so many sleeved in synths here; they tend to be only in jobs that are both manual and invite a fantasy of clinical sterility. You know: biowaste disposal, recycler mucking, vatmeat harvestry, or anything where you would want a biomorph to have a long shower after, before they walked the streets. Pods are common. I expect to be in one for a while. Pod or biomorph, everyone in this city is very, very pretty—to the point where it’s wearying.
We also have quite a few ghosts living in the machines here, which may cause consternation to visitors from far-off gothams. Most are human infugees, and most of these are indentures. There is a small population of limited AGIs here, though, and Mr. Zevi goes to some lengths to keep them from attracting attention. There are perhaps 100 of them, registered in the mesh as private citizens, with addresses in an Experia arcology and no indication they’re not real. But research by networks of people who’ve had mesh contact with them suggests they are almost certainly AGIs, not human infomorphs. The corp media hasn’t caught onto this and most likely never will, unless Zevi decides it’s finally time to let his AGI experiments out of the closet.
Commonly spoken languages include Hindi, English, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Bahasa Indonesian. Hollywood and Bollywood helped shape this city.
The large Indonesian population resulted from a deal between the Oaxaca-Maartens family and the former Indonesian government to rifle the Indonesian national backup files for 250,000 able-minded construction workers and their immediate families. Quoted at the time, Zevi said, “The Indonesians—yes, I got quite a good deal on them.” They are a culturally persecuted underclass, and though most of the Indonesian workers have worked off their indentures, they don’t have opportunities. The Movement has a strong foothold in this community.
Three major roads, Northern Arterial, Southern Arterial, and Western Arterial, with two-lane flyways above them, connect the city’s main regions. Together
these roads are known as the E90. E90 South eventually connects to what is left of the M-5 that once ran to Olympus.
Palazzo is the government district and the seat of the Oaxaca-Maartens family. The architecture here is palatial; you’ll see a bit of American federalist, a hint of Chinese New Imperial, and enough baroque Austrian to choke a flight of cherubs. Elysium describes itself as a constitutional monarchy, with the Oaxaca-Maartens family and their scions as hereditary monarchs. It is a strong monarchy, with the head of the Oaxaca-Maartens family (Zevi) holding important executive powers including a veto over the legislature, extraterritoriality for all of his family’s holdings, the ability to write binding executive orders that can only be countermanded by two-thirds of the parliament, immunity from prosecution for him and his family, and immunity from subpoenas for his and his family’s forks and backups.
North and west of Palazzo is Hyblaeus City, a large neighborhood of offices and studios. Thirty percent of the entertainment content created in the solar system originates in this neighborhood. Busy night and day, this district is also home to a large number of bars and Victoria Terminus, the city’s main maglev rail station.
Corinth Parkways, just north of Hyblaeus City, is where all of the good people live, if you want to deconstruct Consortium propaganda quite literally. Close to downtown are townhouses and staid mansions, the province of the small, buttoned-down segment of Elysium’s wealthy. Further out are modest but comfortable apartments and houses, interspersed with shops and other businesses. A word to investigators at play in this town: do not ignore this neighborhood simply because it looks so plaintively normal. Corinth Parkways is a favorite spot for identity thieves, black clinics, and drug labs to set up shop. A criminal outfit might rent a townhouse in this neighborhood, use it for a month, then pack up and move to cover their trail. Les Goules are thought to have moved bodies through here, and it’s rumored as well that a large portion of Conduit’s bandwidth comes from a swarm of self-replicating antenna bots that were loosed on the rooftops of this neighborhood.
Bainbridge is a canyon twisting off the Northern Arterial where a great many poshly compensated
scenario writers, programmers, producers, engineers, and senior production people live. There’s a lot of what passes for brainpower in Elysium living here. Parties can be interesting. I once entertained for an evening in a robotic exoskeleton that joined with six others like it to form a giant robot. I was a left arm for about two hours. Engineers can be so imaginative. Security in this neighborhood is extremely high and the residents often armed, as hypercorps feeling a tad stabby like to lash out against one another’s intellectual property. Interesting fact: members of the Screenwriter’s Guild Marksmanship Club have a hit ratio in firefights twice that of the average EPM beat cop. Or course, the lovely gentleman I heard this from was an SGMC member.
Dulcimer Canyon is a disused stretch of road in a winding canyon that climbs almost to the surface, ending some 20 meters below the dome lip at the top of the canyon. To reach this place, one has to drive through Bainbridge off onto Dulcimer Canyon, which is a spur twisting off of Bainbridge Canyon. The road is blocked with a traffic barrier, and AR graphics advise that the area is off limits per the Elysium People’s Militia. A kilometer past the barricade is Lost Horizon, a shared workshop once operated by the Lost Horizons Society, a group of tinkerers and citizen scientists, most of whom lived on Bainbridge Canyon. Although all of the men and women involved worked for entertainment hypercorps, many in R&D or engineering work, the work performed at Lost Horizons was that of hobbyists exploring their pet areas of curiosity. Two years ago, someone’s AI experiment got out of control, and the workshop had to be abandoned. The plague of wild artificials was suppressed when a series of controlled EMP bursts were released along the canyon, but rumor has it some still survive. Dulcimer Canyon has been quarantined since, and the eight members of Lost Horizons were arrested (and later disappeared, it seems) and their families relocated.
Kirs-Brookley is the glamorous neighborhood immediately south of Palazzo, a high-security fairyland of beautiful people and voluptuously furnished recreations of Uruguayan Dominion period architecture. Many of the wealthiest entertainers, producers, and media strategists live here. This neighborhood is watched constantly by overhead surveillance drones, and the typical home here is a walled, enclosed compound with private security and hardened infosec.
Chinatown is the entertainment district, partly encircling Kirs-Brookley to its south. The Drag along the South Arterial is an orange tree-lined parkway with nightclubs, simulspace parlors, twenty-four hour augmentation shops, and tea houses running most of its length.
Most of West Elysium consists of working-class housing in modules and mini-domes abutting on twisting souks. Highway and rail come through on elevated pylons, barely interrupting the sprawl. On the fringes of this district are nameless slums where the city’s poorest live around clusters of synthmorph service businesses.
Palembeng is a neighborhood at the mouth of the Hyblaeus Chasma where the souks are dense. It is heavily Indonesian, with high unemployment, and is a hotbed of sympathy for the Movement. Several of the community’s leaders are also low-level officials in the Tharsis League. An entertainment district fronting on the West Arterial is the most visited section of this neighborhood. The rest of Palembeng can be dangerous at any hour; several flocks of gangsters have divided the territory among themselves.
The Elysium People’s Militia (EPMs) are the main police force here. They are humorless and hostile to anyone having a good time. I urge you to avoid them unless you truly need their services. The EPM is competent and brutally efficient. A riot in Palembeng last year was broken up by baboon squads and hallucinogen grenades. Most of their patrols are in flying cars or on bicycles. Their tactical squads do not have a stellar reputation, however.
The Portmanteau Rangers are the local League Rangers, responsible for patrolling the no man’s land between Elysium and the Titan Quarantine Zone. They operate from the town of Portmanteau 50 kilometers south of Elysium on the maglev line to Hellas. Unlike the EPM Tacs, the Portmanteau Rangers are seasoned security forces, experienced in handling wild artificials and even exsurgent threats.
Elysium’s lack of readiness in conflict situations is reflected in its first responders, the EPM’s Tactical Squads. EPM Tacs are widely considered some of the most inexperienced and under-trained in the planet’s major cities. In conventional warfare, they would be a danger only to green, lightly equipped troops.
In addition, they have not seen combat with dangerous artificial life or puppets of the TITANs since shortly after the Fall. Military observers have also questioned the units’ skills with weapon systems key to combating hostile nanoswarms or femtobots. These units cannot be considered reliable support in the event of a TITAN resurgence or a major nanoplague.
A little oligarchy of people and organizations positively hogs the spotlight among Elysium’s wheels.
It’s Zevi’s city. If he allows you to play in it, you must play by his rules. The deathless gerontocrats of Noctis and New Shanghai are largely subtle masters. Oaxaca-Maartens and his family are anything but. They’re oligarchs unafraid to be open in their exercise of power and influence. Zevi seems particularly fond of giving responsibility to his many nephews, birthing the phrase, “some nephew,” for referring to a favored appointee in city government. The family owns several hypercorps other than Experia, including the law firm Oaxaca, Hyannis, & Wales, specialists in biotech law; the security company Rittermark; and Ectomorph, an exclusive resleeving, backup, and egocasting company catering to rich clients with unusual security needs. Zevi and his family favor exalt and sylph morphs— heavily upgraded, one assumes.
All of the Oaxaca-Maartens enterprises rely heavily on AIs, AGIs, and infugee indentures for labor. Zevi himself pioneered the now-illegal technique of indenturing an ego to do administrative work in an office simulspace for three years, then running an arbitrary number of forks of the person (the record was 103 simultaneous instances for one worker) and merging them at the end of the contract. Most would agree the settlement money received by the victims did not go far enough.
Hector Oaxaca is a senior partner at Oaxaca, Hyannis, & Wales and one of the few family members to openly serve in a high-ranking post at a familyowned company. Hector files intellectual property lawsuits at the same pace most men turn oxygen into carbon dioxide.
Leandra Maartens is Zevi’s granddaughter and currently one of the most popular media figures on Mars, with a name recognition of 94.6% among the public (more people could successfully identify her than the Governor General of Valles-New Shanghai). She appears mainly as a talking head on pundit shows and in Scoff, a wildly popular reality vid show in which Leandra takes people to dinner and then says rude (and sometimes funny) things to them throughout the meal.
Manisha Maartens was a doctor in a resleeving clinic when she met Alaric Maartens, one of Zevi’s favorite nephews. Alaric was assassinated a year ago—an act that included an unprecedented successful attack on the Oaxaca-Maartens house backups. Since then Manisha, a virtual stranger to many of the family and previously accustomed to a quiet life, has been kept in a continual media spotlight. I’ll be surprised if the poor woman doesn’t go mad within another six months.
Mayor LaPorte is tall, quite handsome, and beefy. By beefy, I mean fat: a willfully red-cheeked, corpulent man lumbering like a juggernaut through all of us Elysian stick figures. LaPorte is Zevi’s token foil, a political sideshow act who occasionally interferes with Oaxaca-Maartens’s plans, but is tolerated mostly to convince the populace that something called “politics” is still going on in this town. Cormac LaPorte was legitimately elected during a period of public outrage over police handling of a demonstration. LaPorte has partially succeeded in reining in the police force, having put a friendly new chief in place, but at the precinct level he still faces a lot of opposition. LaPorte is given to long-winded speeches on holidays and blustering populist sound bites any time of year.
The Oaxaca-Maartens family is not Experia. Although Zevi remains CEO, and the Oaxaca-Maartens are the majority shareholders, they are not an iron fisted presence in the executive suite. Zevi sets policy and lets his people do their work. Experia is a strongly influential company but not a large one, employing only about 75 people directly. Everyone else is a subcontractor, from security to vid production crews.
Aside from news and entertainment, Experia does a great deal of R&D. From Firewall’s point of view, their research into AGIs and memetic warfare are two areas of concern. AGI research focused on creating a seed AGI might be taking place under Experia’s R&D program; the risk of this needs to be investigated further. Some Experia business partners might also be conducting unorthodox personality fork research, which would be illegal if not of great interest to Firewall.
<Jake Carter, Firewall Proxy>
They say the heart and spirit of Mars is in its small, industrious cities and happy farm towns. They say that in AR interstitials for buggies, anyhow. Mars’s little towns are by and large some beat-up places, full of people who’ve been knocked down a few times too many.
Ashoka’s built into the ground, descending below the permafrost of the chaotic plain on which it lies tens of meters to bedrock. You can take that literal or as a metaphor, if you like. This town’s got influence all out of proportion with its size. It’s a center of the Movement, a spa retreat for the rich, and an important ops center for the TTO. Ashoka’s where city, town, and desert come together.
Instead of being a huge, domed megacity, Ashoka is built into a sixty-meter deep, kilometer-wide cylindrical pit with a transparent, lens-shaped cover over the top. Surface buildings, including a few high-rise housing blocks and hotels, rise at the rim of the pit, their foundations and entryways opening through the pit wall at its bottom. There’s a bazaar, a park, and a Hindu temple, among other landmarks.
Nearby is the Viking Historical Park, a big area that includes the landing sites of the Viking spacecraft and Sojourner rover. Some brain-damaged corp flack hit on the idea of installing AIs in them when they found them, so now both are talking parts of the exhibit. Effin’ dumb if you want my opinion, but the tourists love it.
You won’t see many synths here. This is a town of rusters, although the ten thousand or so tourists swelling the population at any given time will be in a variety of morphs. Common languages you’ll hear are Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Arabic, and English.
Ashoka is strongly with the Movement. The Governor General, Manjit Savekar, is a former terraforming line engineer. Most of the local League functionaries are also friendly to the Movement. This makes Ashoka the stage for a lot of cloak and dagger work. Consortium Oversight people work this town all the time, trying to keep tabs on what they call “hostile elements.” The locals don’t like Oversight at all and rarely help them.
Set near the foot of the northern escarpment of the Argyre Planitia impact basin, Dazhai is your regular type of large company town. About 350,000 people live under a good-sized (800-meter) permanent
dome, several smaller 100-meter pressure domes, and the usual collection of prefabs, tin cans, warrens, and outbuildings. They share their digs with a couple other hypercorps: Brokenridge, a terraforming corp; Pecos, who’ve got the security contract for the town and nearby settlements; and Leong Admintech, one of those catch-all back country admin outfits that’ll do everything from legal rep to supply chaining to infomorph brokerage (that last being where they get the talent pool for everything else they do). The population fluctuates as people come and go from a string of nearby mining camps along the escarpment, which so far’s been a mother lode of copper and bauxite. Great Southern, a maglev line that’s also a Fa Jing subsidiary, has a large railyard here. They run an arterial line connecting Argyre Planitia to the rest of civilization and a bunch of spur lines serving a string of nearby communities and their own mining camps. New Dazhai is the vegemite on their regional economy.
Fa Jing ain’t what you’d call good neighbors, though. They hate visitors in the town itself, and the fares and freight charges they level on the local towns’re pretty near extortionary. People pay, though, because the maglev’s their lifeline. Nobody’s built a highway out to Argyre yet, and Fa Jing likes it that way. Preservationists and nano-ecologists hate them, too, because while you can’t do helluv damage to a dead world with your usual mining pollutants, Argyre Planitia ain’t dead anymore; it’s a major terraforming zone. There’s a lot of concern about heavy metals leaching off the mine tailings and poisoning the northern basin, but when the nano-ecologists have tried to do sampling to find a solution, Fa Jing’s chased them off.
It’s tense, and the weird part of it is that the mines are a really low-margin operation for a corp like Fa Jing; they’re making all their money down there off the Great Southern subsidiary. There’s rumors they dug up something else to sweeten the deal—uranium is a popular matter of speculation—and that’s possible. But all the conspiracy theorists who think they dug up another Pandora Gate or something under that scarp need to shut up and keep their nonsense to themselves. Security there ain’t that tight by half. I prefer the simpler explanation: Fa Jing are a bunch of assholes.
Located in the Valles Marineris, about midway between New Shanghai and Noctis, Pilsener’s your typical small agricultural dome settlement. The people’re mostly in splicers, and ethnically, they’re pretty homogeneous: Japanese. The dome is just under 600 meters in diameter. Eighty percent of the land is crops: wheat, barley, hops, vegetables, maybe some reefer. In the center, there’s a tightly packed town, including offices, a medical center, a few bars, and the homes of the wealthier folk. Be careful going out for a drink here if you’re Chinese; a lot of Japanese infugees ended up indentured to unpopular Chinese managers and still carry a grudge. I got called “chink” here, and I don’t think I look Chinese at all.
Radiating out from the dome are long rows of greenhouses, growing more food, and a souk-like network of homes and small businesses. As its name implies, brewing (with locally grown ingredients) is the town’s major industry, and there is a massive brewery building here as well. There’s a solar farm outside the dome, but the community fusion reactors are inside. On one edge of the dome is a small trucking depot. It’s about ten klicks from there to the nearest railroad stop.
When’re you going to end up in a place like Pilsener City on a Firewall mission? Hell, maybe never. But mark my words, some weird-ass shit goes on in these little ditchstop farm domes.
<Jake Carter, Firewall Proxy>
Much of Mars is open plains and frigid high desert, traversed by maglev tracks and lonely byways.
Ma’adim is practically a crack in the ground compared to some of the other things on this planet got “Vallis” in their names, but scaled to a human being standing at its mouth, it’s an impressive sight, bigger than the Grand Canyon of Earth. Less than half a klick in there’s a perfectly cylindrical cut about 10 meters diameter deep in the canyon wall. You come into it through a gap about three meters wide. In the center of the cut, standing in the open air, is the Martian Gate, now controlled by the Pathfinder corp.
The gate was first found by sufi nomads ranging southward from the Gusev Crater at the canyon mouth. Somehow some high-ranking Consortium figures got wind of the find, realized the value of it, and tried to buy the sufis off, but they weren’t interested. So they bought the land out from under them and established a territorial claim on the property, which was outside any established government’s sphere of influence. Then they hired Herzog security, a firm from the Valles Marineris midlands, to storm the gate and shoot all of the sufis. Which they did. The rumor that a sufi async opened the gate and some of his clan escaped through it before Herzog overwhelmed them is probably just that—a rumor.
The Consortium suits quickly pooled resources and pulled strings, and in short order Pathfinder was founded and given control of the situation, with full Consortium backing. The new hypercorp immediately established Ma’adim Research Park, a small settlement in the canyon, centered around the gate. Similar to Elysium, a short stretch of the canyon is walled and lidded to hold an atmosphere. Outside there is an airfield, maglev depot, and a long, lonely stretch of highway that connects after about 1,000 kilometers to a highway running into the Hellas basin. Few visitors arrive by road. No one enters the settlement without an invite from Pathfinder. The place is set up to efficiently support and deploy gatecrasher teams, with a new team ready to go every time a window opens up.
Herzog, Pathfinder’s security contractor here, are smart and well-equipped. Infiltrators shouldn’t expect meek resistance from their infosec specialists, and it’s unwise to get in a stand-up firefight with them.
To support the logistics of the Pathfinder Colonization Initiative, Pathfinder has constructed a city about forty kilometers from the canyon mouth. People’ve been commenting on the distance—maybe these rumors that’ve been going around about massive energy releases from mishandled gates are more than hearsay. Dubbed Pathfinder City, numerous massive building projects are still underway, giving the settlement a lively but unfinished air. An arterial highway has been constructed between the city and the gate site in the canyon, along with a corresponding set of rail lines. In short, it’s infrastructure for a full scale colonization effort—despite the fact that the number of actual colonies that have been economically viable so far has been extremely limited. Gotta have dreams, I guess.
The fact that the Martian Gate is just south of the Titan Quarantine Zone is a fact lost on no one. Though there has been no sign of TITAN machine activity or interest in the area, Herzog and Pathfinder pay particular attention to the stretch of land between the two.
A deep impact basin located far in the northern plains, Korolev is sheltered enough that many sufi and maker nomad clans spend the harshest months of the Martian winter here. The crater’s thus a semi-permanent settlement, with a small crew of clan wardens stationed here to do terraforming work year round. During winter, you might find as many as 10,000 nomads camped here. There’s also a permanent ecology station that breeds lichens and microbes for seeding in the surrounding landscape. Dozens of wind turbines on high spars or on the basin rim provide a low-footprint power grid for the camps. Similar camps accompanied by terraforming or ecostations exist at Aggasiz, Burroughs, and Chamberlin craters in the southern hemisphere, and at Curie, Escorial, and Littleton craters in the north.
<Moxie Harper, Firewall Sentinel>
” … And you will have treasure in heaven.”—
Mark 10:21 Twenty million people live in Martian orbit, the
majority of them in the areosynchronous zone near the equator. The space above Olympus Mons is especially crowded, with scores of immense orbital industrial parks and long haul shipping facilities situated to get goods and materials to and from the surface quickly. Further from the space elevator tether are corporate stations, research facilities, and the private sanctuaries of the mega-wealthy.
Formerly the moon known as Deimos, Progress orbits Mars about every 30 hours. It’s a cylindrical Cole habitat with immense windows cut into it, making it resemble an immense stone O’Neill cylinder that tapers somewhat toward the ends. The hab has busy spaceports at both of its rotational axes. This place is corp hell. My first gig as a driver, and my only long-term job offworld, was driving an air taxi for execs and their families around the cylinder. I’d hoped working around the vomitously rich might be a good angle for a cool hunter, but all I learned was that you cannot, repeat cannot, buy taste. The problem is that when you have enough money, no one is going to tell you that you can’t wear hot orange with aquamarine or that your cosmetic surgery is not cute, but just makes your morph’s face look all effed up. Insulated from how actual transhumans dress groundside, this place is a non-stop parade of high-markup fashion crimes.
Fortunately, for every stay-at-home spouse dressed like an inmate from a pre-genetic engineering home for the simple, there are three people in suits so sharp you could cut yourself on the creases. Yes, pretty. Be warned: there is nothing funky about these people; they are face-eating eels in exalt sleeves, no matter what kind of front they show. Progress is where the ambitious come to get powerful, and they are not fucking around.
Did I mention the entire fucking hab smells like an ashtray? Smoking is so popular here that you can almost spot an outsider by whether they’re lighting up, and there are two large hydroponics installations orbiting with the hab that grow nothing but tobacco. What you smoke is a display of rank, and within corps, there are unspoken sumptuary customs. It’s a major gaffe to smoke a mid-level executive brand if you’re a junior exec, for instance. Smoking wears out your morph, sucks more resources out of recycling systems, and gives your life support system that not so fresh feeling … so why do they do it? I’ll go with unmitigated group megalomania on this one: you smoke to show that you don’t care if you’re morph’s on its last leg at 40. You are a successful motherfucker, and you’re going to buy a new one. That’s the kind of attitude that’ll get the honchos admiring the cut of your jib up here.
So far in this report, we’ve all been saying something about how each city looks, maybe talking about the architecture. Well, it sucks. The place looks like the placenta left behind as the sleep of reason breeds monsters. The built landscape around here is one part Chinese New Imperial, one part executive desk toy, two parts high-end southern California shopping mall circa BF 65. The plant life is obsessively manicured.
You know how if you want a relaxing atmosphere, greenery can help out a lot? Well, the people who laid out Progress must have been aliens who read that bit of wisdom in a book but didn’t understand it at all.
Progress is home base for nearly two million vacworkers, most of whom are sleeved in synths. There is a higher proportion of pods and infomorphs as well, both commonly indentures. Exalts, sylphs, hibernoids, and mentons are all common morphs here; only proles sleeve in splicers. Pod morphs are common, especially for indentures, and many security details and bodyguard teams have novacrabs in them.
Progress is a polyglot town. You’ll hear Mandarin, Hindi, English, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, and French commonly, and other languages frequently enough. Everyone here used to rule something, from Marathi technocrats to Uruguayan generals, and they’re all eager to tell you about it in their own tongue.
On a lush stretch of parkland near the center of the cylinder is Planetary Consortium HQ, a white marble campus of administrative buildings and hypercorp consulates that serves as the administrative center for the Consortium. All of the Hypercorp Council corps have offices here, with the exception of Solaris, who avoid having offices on general principles. The immense phallic spires of the Consortium’s Ministry are here, though they take backstage to the pleasant, airy domes that hold the halls of the Planetary Congress and the various media offices that focus so intensely on the cyberdemocracy spectacle. Off to the side, the square blocks of Progress Bank are a monument to safe-like security, if you can avoid the neo-soviet architectural style.
Situated looking up toward HQ on the opposite side of the cylinder, Roycewoods is arguably the most exclusive neighborhood in the solar system. High-level execs, corp lobbyists, and officers of the Consortium live here on cobbled, tree-lined streets patrolled by armed ornithopters and elite PSS officers. Powerful people have lived in this neighborhood for some time now. The Roycewoods Country Club House, with its distinctive green peaked roof and clock tower, is constructed of stone from a medieval French abbey that was almost claimed by the Atlantic well before the Fall.
On one side of HQ are the Tangles—Nottingham, Bankside, and Franconia—three upscale neighborhoods, each housing an echelon of the Consortium hierarchy. These neighborhoods are primarily bedroom communities interspersed with small businesses. They’re anonymous places, comfortable for the security minded. Have a good reason to be here at night, or the PSS will not leave you alone.
On the other side of HQ, past a wall of somber administrative buildings, is the Yards, the workers’ district. The three main neighborhoods here are Al-Rashid, home to many vac and infrastructure workers; Friday Park, where a lot of service industry people live; and Bailey, where the cops and emergency personnel live.
Progress Station Security (PSS) is one of the best private security companies in the system. Their primary contract is to maintain order on Progress and to protect Consortium interests. Their tac squads train heavily for microgravity ops in hard suits. The station also has defense batteries and a small fleet of ships.
Located between the Yards and HQ, this U-Mars campus is the most prestigious in the system. The Dowager School of Economics and the Friedman Institute of Management are both located here. You can’t take a wild swing with a samurai sword in this place without decapitating an MBA. Of more concern is Dowager’s Polymorphic Econometrics Lab, which has been alleged to use AGIs in developing and testing new economic models.
Phobos orbits Mars about every 7 hours and would have destroyed the space elevator within a week of it going up if they hadn’t done something about this sucker’s chaotic orbit. Now Phobos orbits the straight and narrow and is crawling with Cognite employees. Cognite has a controlling interest in Phobos, sharing it with with several other corps, including Direct Action, ComEx, and Eng/Dilworth, an IT firm specializing in automation and security for orbital stations.
Phobos is where the project that created the Lost generation got its start; the first crèche servers were located here. Cognite’s Wauxhall Institute was involved in the Lost project and is also rumored to be taking part in experiments with the Watts-MacLeod strain of the exsurgent virus.
Pontes is an O’Neill cylinder originally founded by Brazilian interests and also attracting residents from other South American cultures. It is notable for hosting the largest shipyards in the Mars system. A significant portion of its population works for hypercorps focusing on particular elements of the aerospace industry, from spacecraft engineering to rocket design to construction. While many of the ships are manufactured for Consortium hypercorp clients, the Pontes yards cater to other interests as well.
Pontes is also noteworthy as being the Martian habitat most open towards outer system types. The habitat welcomes numerous Extropian hypercorps and Titanian microcorps, and several neighborhoods are devoted to faithfully representing outer system cultures and lifestyles. It is reasonably easy to work out rep-credit exchanges here; if the banks won’t do it, various private operations will. Even the Jovians have a presence in the region known as Little Argentina. Many Consortium hypercorps arrange their dealings with outer system polities here—though most are well aware that Oversight keeps a close watch on activities in this habitat.
There are too many stations in Mars orbit to describe in such a short space, but I’ll mention a few that are fairly important. Each of these stations is run predominantly by one hypercorp, but multiple corps might have a share in any given station’s ownership and ops. Most of these stations are in areosynchronous or areostationary orbit. Factions sometimes create settlements, too, although they’re fairly rare.
McClintock is Ecologene’s masterpiece, a living space hab whose thick hull is a material similar to wood, here and there interrupted by vast windows paned in transparent chitin. Housing, offices, and commercial buildings are scattered across a woodsy parkland clearly designed by someone who loved Bambi.
Lu Xing (Prosperity Group) is a research station. This is where they grow the space meats. Station population is 5,000, plus a complement of 500 vacworkers who stay outside in their synths. Aside from living space, much of the station is given over to huge R&D spaces where new meat culture strains and texturizing processes are experimentally tested.
Like Lu Xing, Ptah is primarily an R&D station where Skinaesthesia investigates new gene lines for its morphs. It does, however, have a palatial morph boutique open by appointment to the Martian elite.
Viriditas (nano-ecologists) is an orbital manufacturing platform. To advance their research, the nanoecologists believe they need large scale microgravity industry to build their tools. Everything produced here is used on the surface, or at least it’s supposed to be. There are a lot of gangsters who pay long credits for programmable swarms, and not all of their shipments of nanobot hives might be making it to their intended destinations.
The Batteries (Planetary Consortium) are six stations in the tenuous Mars-Phobos L4 and L5 orbits. Each orbits Mars about every 7.5 hours. Bristling with weaponry and bolstered by a network of drone and commsats, they’re a strongpoint in Martian planetary defenses.
<Jake Carter, Firewall Proxy>
The TQZ’s part tomb, part zombie museum, part imminent threat. It forms a scalene triangle with rough vertices just east of Arsia Mons in the western outskirts of the Noctis Labyrinthus, just southwest of Olympus Mons on the Amazonis Planitia, and at Gale Crater, south of Elysium. So it covers parts of Tharsis, the Amazonis Planitia, Lucus Planum, and the Elysium Planitia. I grew up out here; it used to be the most heavily settled part of the planet outside Tharsis.
The outskirts of the TQZ seem pretty normal, but by the time you’re wondering what the big deal was about, you start seeing that there’s something real wrong with the terrain. The actions of the TITANs left weird landforms: fractal barrows, termite mounds, and disassembler aeolians, among others. Fractal barrows look like geometricallybranching clusters of wing-like shapes made of finely patterned slag. The process that forms them hasn’t been studied, but given they’re made of iron, the barrows’re probably a byproduct of baking the regolith for oxygen and other volatiles. Termite mounds seem to be the reverse: weird columns of glittering yellowy-white silicate shaped a lot like the giant termite mounds on old Earth, formed by a process that extracts iron. Disassembler aeolians resulted in places where an active cloud of disassembler nanobots was pushed by strong winds against or through a rock formation, possibly more than once. They look like hoodoos and other wind erosion formations, but the stone is newer and the shapes they form much more extreme.
Arsia’s the southernmost of the Tharsis Montes (the others, to its north, are Pavonis Mons and Ascraeus Mons). The mountain’s fully inside the TQZ, but it’s close enough to Tharsis’s major highways to make it attractive for smugglers. Hostile machines are rare here, but they still appear often enough to keep this place under quarantine. The Martian Rangers and occasional Consortium military patrols’re more of a threat than exsurgents here.
Set on the massive natural overlook formed by Apollinaris Mons, Qurain was built as a fortress. They were Muslims of some sort—never really understood the theology myself. Qurain was a Martian city-state in its own right, with a lot of dependent settlements scattered around what’s now the Zone. I spent some time in this area sellingcondenser pool shoju to them, just like my dad did to the the Muslims where I grew up—markup’s better than on cabbage. Muslims or no, the illegal liquor trade to Qurain kept a lot of us rednecks afloat back then. Now Qurain is a ruin. You’ll see scatterings of burnt-out, dust-choked domes on the way in, then the citadel itself up on Apollinaris Patera, cracked in half by a tac nuke. Qurain died quickly in the Fall, and the other city-states didn’t have to think about it more than five minutes before bombing the place back to rust. There was a massive tunnel complex under the citadel and numerous surface buildings that partially survived the nukes, leaving a lot of ground to explore for scavengers. Most of the place is hot, though, so don’t forget to pack your de-ionizing nanopharm.
This is where the flyovers end. The White Zone is the most dangerous part of the TQZ, where you still run into active warbots, zombified transhumans, nanoplagues, and the like. It’s also the heart of the TQZ, centered roughly around a big ridge on the Amazonis Planitia called Amazonis Sulci. If you’re going in here, have your weapons hot and your killswitch program ready. There’s stuff in here that’ll break your brain down into its component atoms and replace it with sentient tapioca, just for kicks. The fact this area’s still so active is a source of worry to both the Consortium and Firewall. The PC’s made matters worse by dropping bunker buster nukes on Amazonis Sulci, thinking if they drill into it they’ll kill some beating heart of evil. Idiocy … I mean shit, are things ever that simple? Still, something under that ridge is still cranking out helluv monsters.
Believe it or not, people live here. Whether you want to call them people or not is a debate I don’t want to get into, because the evidence ain’t weighed yet. There are reports from the smugglers all the time about individual drifters, hermits and such, wandering into or out of the Zone. More intriguing for my money’re rumors of the Yazidis, a clade of authentics who supposedly got abandoned out here during the Fall. Like the sufis, they were ecostation nomads with a mystic bent, but they ain’t sufis. They speak Kurdish, though they ain’t Kurds, and on old Earth they lived in southern Turkey. We’ve got evidence of the Yazidis—a little refuse from a camp here, bit of footage recorded by a distant scavenger there—but the patrols’ve never spotted them. They ain’t exsurgents, but they might be classifiable as exhumans.
The one person I know of who’s ever talked to them was a smuggler named Deja Torvik who ran into a band of them when she had to abandon her flyer over the Zone evading a patrol. She claims the
Yazidis helped her find her way and resupplied her. They talked about how their head angel, Tawûsê Melek, had sent machines into the world to cleanse it of human evil. After she came out of the desert, Torvik started acting weird. She got a whole mess of new implants, mostly cybernetic as I hear it, and then about a month later disappeared with nothing but a note to a few old friends that she was going to rejoin the Yazidis. Hasn’t been heard from again.
Give anyone you meet in the TQZ a wide berth, is my advice, unless you’re there specifically to investigate them. It’s a big place, and there’s more weirdness than just the Yazidis hiding out there.
Entry transcribed from an account provided by Jiang Mee, over beers at a maker camp on the outskirts of Hellas Planitia.
Stupidest thing I ever did was one time I was running repairs on chlorofluorocarbon generators out by the Zone. My rover had a bad strut, and I stepped outside to take a look at a spot not half a klick from the quarantine signs. The wind was strong that day, and it took my hat straight off my head. Before I could catch it, a dust devil had it and carried it a dead run straight into the zone. Now, I could have let it go, but it was a genuine oil-tanned leather Stetson, one of the few items my dad had brought from Earth. What can I say, I really liked that hat.
So I jumped back in my rover and went after it. I knew this stretch of the zone boundary didn’t have a solid sensor mesh, and I didn’t plan to be in there long.
I must have chased that dust devil for 10 klicks. Every time I nearly caught it, it would get carried away again, and the wind was moving it fast enough I couldn’t get ahead due to the rocky terrain. Finally I saw my hat get blown into a narrow ravine. There was no way to get my rover down there, but I knew the hat wasn’t coming back out, so I hoofed it.
The ravine was deep and narrow, a dark crack in the ground. It took me a few minutes to climb down and locate my hat. I never felt so good, getting that back on my head. Until I heard the whirring, that is.
I had just enough time to look around and see that the walls in that part of the ravine were crawling with bots. Weird, freaky, alienlooking bots. Hundreds of ‘em. All at once they were making little buzzing noises, like I had disturbed their nest. I felt some of them land on me, then I lost consciousness.
I came to in the dark. I still had my gear, so onceIhadthearealitupIcouldtellIwasina tunnel. My muse told me I’d been out for about four hours. I was sleeved in a ruster, so I wasn’t worried about running out of O2. There was no sign of the bots—but I did have my hat.
I spent about ten hours trying to find my way out of those tunnels. It was a complete maze down there. The tunnels easily stretched for klicks. Space was cramped. Some of the tunnels were so small I had to get on my hands and knees and crawl through. There were signs that something had been active down there. I found strange markings on the walls, and various types of tracks left by synthetic sources. At one point, I stumbled on what seemed to be a graveyard of robotic shells—a whole pile of them, all cracked open, like discarded husks. Eventually I found a chute I could climb that brought me back to the surface. When I finally got my bearings, I was about 20 klicks southwest of where I had started. I wasn’t even in the TQZ any more.
That’s my story. I don’t know if they were TITAN machines—I just assume so. I don’t know why they didn’t take my head or infect me with something. I checked myself in for every type of scan imaginable, and I came up clean. They didn’t seem to care about me—it more seemed like they wanted to be left alone, to do their thing.
I heard a rumor once that the Consortium found tunnels in the area of the Martian Gate, which they promptly sealed off. That’s not too far from where I lost my hat. It makes you wonder, eh?