100 Twisted Settings for Mothership

 

The flutter of a moth's wings, still beating, pin driven through the thorax, as all the whole world shifts around its axis. Fluttering, too. All shapes changing. What flickers out there now? What lies in wait?

Big ol' table of possible setting twists for Mothership!

[cw: economic horror, corporate horror, body horror, sexuality, isolation.]

This is a collection of different angles on how a speculative humanity might live out in space, and the tonal flavor it might have. There's some recurrent elements, based on what I find interesting right now, but a big part of the exercise was about exploring unconventional ways to play with and against Mothership's "default" worn-in corporate-horror sci-fi setting.

Wasn't sure how to organize this, so y'all get it in the order it was written! I think this creates the most variety while reading through. It was written to be read through in order, used as a d100 table at the top of a session or during session zero, to provide inspiration for specific locations or whole campaign settings, or just open up a sense of possibility for brainstorming.

Each entry is a generalization, some contradictory, others compatible. They may be true across the whole of settled space, or only within a particular context or location, or be rumors, theories, and cultural beliefs. Do what works!

If this is true, then how do human cultures respond? What else is true? What becomes impossible? What becomes commonplace? How do people think and feel about this reality? As societies, communities, and individuals? What do your characters believe?

What this isn't: a coherent or comprehensive guide to any particular setting. I think that kind of thing is a little antithetical to horror anyway. The fiction should be fractured, unruly, and ultimately unknowable if possible. If you use anything here, don't cling to it. Complicate, contradict, and defy.

(If you do end up using this at the table, I'd love to hear how it goes!)

[Written for Mothership Month! For the uninitiated: Mothership Month "is a group-collab project led by Tuesday Knight Games featuring some of the brightest stars from the Mothership third-party publishing (3PP) community ... Think of Mothership Month as a pep rally for the entire Mothership community." (Tuesday Knight Games, "Mothership Month" on Backerkit) Chances are you're here through the Mothership discord and knew that already, though!]

1D100 SETTING TWISTS

1. The Company has nothing at the center. All those ships, all that cargo, is hauled back to a dead or dying core in full collapse, while operations on the rim continue like the spasms of dying muscle.

2. The Company is a god incarnated, its executive suite is a single shred of colonizing intelligence, that gropes through our reality with a thoughtless hunger, the fruiting body of a titanic non-space entity that feeds on human fantasy and despair

3. Sex is casual. Body mods, high-quality contraception (or rampant infertility), custom pharm solutions, and cheap teledildonics make it a common hobby, method of stress relief, and source of human connection in the face of everyday pressures.

4. Sex is hyper-cautious. Folks are used to wearing layers of PPE for environmental and workplace hazards, medical care for human-borne parasites and diseases is inaccessible, and there are strong penalties for unauthorized relational conduct in Company Policy. It’s done carefully, secretly, remotely, or in many cases not at all.

5. Sex and relationships are computer-mediated to optimize productivity and reduce stress, but as with any algorithm-driven system applied at scale, uncanny patterns emerge and can be exploited.

6. Cryosleep is wet. Passengers are submerged in breathable preservative, their blood is pumped out and replaced with stable fluids, acceleration is cushioned by swollen gel, and they emerge wrinkled, sallow, and dripping wet.

7. Cryosleep is dry. The body is dehydrated with heat and mineral powders. Blood is drained. The brain is kept alive by marginal electrical stimulus, and the body is rapidly rehydrated on arrival.

8. Cryosleep is messy. The pod is a huge biocompatible organ that takes over life support, breathes carbon dioxide, takes the passenger slowly into a state of torpor, and exudes them later, slick with mucus.

9. Cryosleep is cold. Passengers are wrapped in a reflective cocoon and flash-frozen by supercooled gasses. Thawing too quickly or staying under too long can cause nasty tissue damage.

10. Cryosleep is creepy. A smoke-shrouded ritual process and  psychoactive cocktail triggers a neurological cascade. The passengers are strapped into cushioned pod-slabs by an android-priest, suffer through unsettling dreams, and awake hungover and sometimes Changed. The soul is said to leave the body entirely, at risk of something Else taking its place.

11. The Company is ancient. Its rituals and traditions have their roots in humanity’s long-gone seed-world. It has guided us into space since the beginning, and faithful adherence to its Rightful Operations will carry us to bright days among the stars.

12. The Company is a new infection. Its explosive spread has violently overturned the old world, and even now it finds new crevices to force its influence into. Get out while you can, before the corporate web hardens into a cage.

13. Space is a dead ocean, full of drifting wreckage and deceptive predators. The vacuum yawns at the hull like a vast, all-consuming shore, beckoning the restless out into its empty stomach. Here, leviathans float in total silence.

14. Space is a cold machine, it’s every motion precise and calculable. You live and die by the quiet tyranny of Physical Laws.

15. Space is an old tapestry, slowly breathing, formed from millions of connected strands, rough-spun and complex, easy to find yourself tangled in trade routes, intrigue, and ever-teeming human connection. The pattern it forms is more than you will ever understand.

16. Space is the violent nightmare of a dying god. It practically drips with viscera. Hyperspace travel rips great wounds in its flesh, and strange life pours out, uncurling in the dark. Stars burn and streak, momentary omens against the veil, as it shudders itself into bewildering forms before a very final end.

17. Space is a slow river, fat with trade and travel. The accumulated silt of hundred-mile cities and megadactories lays thick on planetary crust, where travelers come to rest. The long road to distant stars winds through well-worn channels. Survival is about learning to move with the current.

18. Space is a bonfire, stars sprayed out like sparks in an endless night. Everything is caught in the heat of inexorable transformation, a race toward maximum entropy, riotous disarray. New cultures bloom and burn with every cycle. Rocket engines roar. Everything shines brightly and nothing lasts.

19. The Company is inside you. It owns at least a controlling interest in the components for all kinds of necessary mods and wetware, and thus owns bits of space-workers, whole chunks if you believe the fine print. Organs can be shut down remotely if necessary, or throttled on non-payment of upkeep fees, or set to maladapt as a disciplinary action.

20. Androids are like dolls, their features frozen and artificial, eyes and mouths flickering in isolation. Body panels are glossy and solid, sculpted to match the prevailing beauty standard — which dates out-of-fashion models. Move with hyper-controlled precision.

21. Androids are hand-stitched vat-grown abominations, specially engineered for brutal work conditions but wretched to look upon. They’re jacketed in thick brand-compliant pseudoleather,  with jawless circular mouths and bulging secretory glands. Depending on the worksite, they’ll be grafted with a wide variety of local xenoforms.

22. Androids are clattering, wire-strewn digital homunculi. Their fingers click. They’re highly customizable, often idiosyncratic, announced by the whir of fans and coolant, speak in roughly vocoded strings. On jobsites, they’re bagged up in rugged vacuum-tight polymer, heads masked with corporate mascots, gleaming chrome skulls, the faces of IP tie-ins, and mouthless hard-cases.

23. Androids are a colony organism, grown in a pit farm and strung across a servo-motivated frame, coated in a translucent membrane capable of advanced biocognition, packed with pulsing yellow processing organs. They eat voraciously to maintain bodymass, and need constant moisture to prevent atrophy.

24. Androids are proprietary and near-featureless. A product to be consumed then discarded, used until they break, their polished alloy shells scuffed and sticker-covered. They are polite and precise to a fault. Built in elegant imitation of the human form, but double-jointed and hauntingly fast for efficient operation in zero-g.

25. Androids are a dryware brain-stem and aluminum skeleton packed into a polydown-stuffed character costume to appear friendly and approachable. Company-approved music plays from under their fluffy bulk at all times. They secrete pleasant smells to maintain brand experience, and are programed to simulate (and create) intense emotional expression.

26. Communication is slow. We’ve cracked FTL travel, but not comms, so clusters are reliant on messenger ships, which in turn are dependent on a positive cost-benefit ratio to keep running. Failed colonies are ghosted without warning. Messages go years or decades without response.

27. Communication is relentless, if you can afford it. Ansibles link all Company-controlled space and the talknet pours like a great, inescapable cataract. Real-time surveillance and data-monitoring is rampant, culture is hyper-commodified and paid by the second. But connectivity is used as a great socioeconomic filter, with access to many services (to include banking, medicine, and travel) gated behind layers of monitored and monetized accounts, all of which are instantly and automatically revokable upon ToC violation. True Citizenship is granted to those who are “chipped in with identity implants. Workplace performance is rated in real-time by microcredit-per-click Observation Workers and autonomous Brothers.

28. Family is a luxury. Most folks are spit out of a corporate exowomb, and take their first breath in debt for gestation and birth costs. They are raised in batches, and put to work in a rotating sequence of teams, crews, and operation-gangs. Forming rapid, temporary friendships and romances is a well-worn skill. It has to be.

29. Families are found and fiercely guarded. From desperate circumstances come tight-knit lineages, intensely proud and protective of their continued survival. Families are widespread but officially sanctioned (they threaten the Absolute Corporate Loyalty required by Standard Contract Terms), so there are few shared mainstream values. Structures and practices are highly individuated, and families often develop isolated languages and microcultures.

30. Family is a Company Value. Of course, this means a particular kind of family. One which is tidy, consumerist, and totally devoted to Infinite Growth. Everyone is beautiful and nobody argues. All other relationships are discouraged, and implied to lead to moral dissolution and risk of physical illness or death. Human connection is said to be a zero-sum resource, not to be wasted carelessly.

31. Hyperspace is a living mystery. It billows and unfolds, always out of reach. It is a timeless, deathless Otherspace, that blinks and watches. To be awake in hyperspace is to be dreaming twice, recursive layers of imagination, infinitely nested, awash in the Great Unconscious. It’s easy to be lost in the dream, and never awake.

32. Hyperspace is the skin of a stellar organism. Jump points are a pore through which you slip inside. Warp cores are fleshy seed-beacons, used to prevent immune response. And within, distance is meaningless. It’s all membranes, organelles, and veins, shifting like nebulae. Observable, but freaky.

33. Hyperspace is an empty sea, emptier even than Standard Reality. It is infinity and nothingness, held simultaneously. And yet, it moves. Currents flow erratically through its Subject Medium, drawing ships helplessly with them. Reliable navigation is essential, and based on dense calculations. The things that manage to live here, colorless and coiled, are best avoided.

34. Family is a business, directed towards generating enough capital for the Company to ensure survival into the next financial cycle. Members are born into the family business, and allowed to remain as long as they make more credits than they cost. Emotional connection remains, though it is often transactional and some regard it an unnecessary relic of an under-monetized past.

35. Family is an aquifer, running cold and vital far beneath the withered crust of colonial life. It is a refuge from the churning inhumanity of Company Economics, where old rituals are carried on among the stars, in low-lit habs and group berths.

36. The Company is dying. Slowly, it’s organizational neurons flicker out, bases go dark, factories fall still. It is suffocating beneath its own weight. Contracts fall through, whole systems are laid off and shut down. Rimward Expansion is a fatal grasp for some unknown salvation or gateway to a new frontier, while the Great Ladder collapses around our heads.

37. The Company is a corpse puppet, paraded in grim parody across the stars by grifters, dictators, and profiteers, clinging tight to the greying skin of a cadaverous leviathan. It is mummified by the efforts of a billion imposters, a great sack of skin squirming with maggots. Already, the mess is beginning to reek. Before long, it will rot away entirely.

38. The Company is dead. The Articles of Dissolution make a slow march outward from the core. All its assets are up for grabs, and in this maddened whalefall, the Rim will burn.

39. The Company is your best friend. Really. You love and embrace the Company with both arms, and in its warmth you have found a home, forever safe from uncertainty. It knows what is best for you. For everyone. Trust the Company. There is nothing else that matters.

40. The Company is not human. It never was. From the beginning, creatures without faces or names or bodies came into the human mind and made puppets of the weak and greedy. They have spread far and wide, guided us into hyperspace, given us the gift of cryosleep, so we might grow to succulent ripeness in stomach of Mother Milkomeda. They cannot reach us, except through their Faithful Servants, who take everything for the Law of Infinite Growth. And those Happy Few will be rewarded as gods.

41. Hyperspace is Hell made manifest. It boils with hungry non-space entities dying to rip upward into our world. It is hot and fast. Huge vistas of jagged glass open over great seas of molten rock. Exposed skin bubbles and cracks. The human mind is vulnerable to invasion while conscious, made safe only by cryosleep.

42. Hyperspace is a rhythm. The drumbeat of the universe, pulsing and slow. You don’t jump, you dance, moving with an ocean of raw sound. The Great Baseline, going forever, on which the melodies of reality are built. Within it, time is meaningless, and each sleep is an eternity.

43. Hyperspace is a root system, dirty and tangled. It is the ecosystem underpinning everything, vast and fecund. Each jump route is a hard-carved burrow, thick with parasites, larvae, and decomposers. To dig is slow work, the work of many generations. No single lifetime can see it done.

44. Communication is rare. All tickets are one-way. There is no going back. There is no seeing their faces again. Signals are sent flickering into the void but the vast majority find no listeners. We have outrun our own voices, and struggle alone into the dark, guided by ancient work orders. They sent androids with us for company and to see the task completed. Whether it needs to be or not.

45. Space is a frozen continent, harsh and uncompromising. A vanishing few venture out there. There is little need. But curiosity and Company funding carry an obsessed handful of explorers out into the cold. Few go out. Fewer come back, bringing home terrifying stories of starvation, madness, and predation in the cruel emptiness beyond the local atmosphere.

46. Space is being consumed by the Company’s hunger for Constant Expansion as it outgrows each new colony in turn. Terraforming is destructive and cheap. Planets are considered disposable. Expeditions are carried out to feed The Company’s data-vaults, carry back precious resources, abandon prisoners and exiles, and seed the New Rim for an Empire to grow forever.

47. Space is an infinite sports stadium. Habitation and industry are largely confined to gravity wells, so the void  holds only critical infrastructure and a vast canvas for entertainment. Crews are sent to far flung locales to perform and compete for an audience of billions. Sometimes they know. Sometimes they are raised from the egg to play a part in some unfolding drama they will never see.

48. Space is a graveyard. It is chock-full of bones. Old civilizations, new wreckage, and slow-trawling catacomb-ships, ferrying pilgrims through the vacuum. Layer upon layer of history has fallen across the galaxy, in strange and varied profusion.

49. Androids are the new humanity, made in the Company’s image from silicone and steel, to carry on its work and gradually replace an unruly and outdated workforce. They are more efficient, more slick, more friendly, more predictable, and — best of all — cheaper in the short term. (Don’t worry about the long-term impact. There’s always more planets.) Many folks welcome the rollout of these attractive simulacra. It’ll make life easier. Advancement requires sacrifice. And so on. Good luck with that.

50. Androids are vat-children, born into debt. They are indoctrinated in isolation, implanted with a robust suite of Company surveillance and compliance technologies, and have a dramatically shorter life expectancy because of material impurities and poor QA, but are otherwise, biologically, human. There’s a growing liberation movement, and the Company isn’t happy about it.

51. Androids are walking tanks, equipped for the unending slaughter of Corporate Warfare. They contain a number of redundant systems, and are hardened against CBRN threats, but are heavy and slow as a result.

52. Androids are chimeric. They have been grafted together from the choicest products of corporate bioengineering. Each is custom, fitted with a task-specific skeleton, skin, and organs. They are jacketed head-to-toe in standard-issue DuraLine polycanvas coveralls to hide surgery scars and unsettling body-forms from their coworkers. Beyond the company, some revel in their nakedness, unique and beautiful.

53. Credits are credit. I know that sounds obvious. What I mean is that they’re a measure of debt, not value. They’re not backed by any asset or resource, except maybe human labor. Each is a splinter of the mighty tree the Company is crushing us under. Every credit will eventually be repaid in unkindness. They are a mark of Company ownership, and all that has been extracted from you. You might think of them as a way to buy your freedom, but really you’re just selling yourself. Grok this: we’ve gotta burn the whole thing if we wanna get out.

54. Credits are a numerical representation of social standing. All social interactions are explicitly transactional. Power is finally reducible to a number on your wrist.

55. Credits are backed by flesh. They are given by the Meatbanks in exchange for donated organs and tissues, body parts are identified as collateral in contract terms, and organ surrogacy is widespread. This bounty flows down into the low halls of power, where Planetary Barons must be remade cycle-by-cycle to survive.

56. Space is an old fire. Smoke rises from the ash of broken worlds, pocked with craters and mining scars. Leather-hard dirt and massive colony organisms greet pioneers. The Company moves slow, crawling out from its Homeworlds, stretching its tentacles out through the firelight of a million suns.

57. Androids are digital angels, come into an uncanny body. They are a byproduct of supercomputer operation, forming in data-rich loci, given shape to adjudicate the Corporate Commandments, eyes burning with a total hatred of Inefficiency. All will be improve, that it might shine to Heaven, from which the Board gazes down.

58. Androids are stoneware vessels, masked and hooded, into which a hyperspace entity is poured, its oily shape congealing to fit new limbs. They test their teeth on bulkheads They are tireless and unpredictable. They are full of feeling siphoned off from their human coworkers. They cannot be controlled, but the Company tries.

59. Hyperspace doesn’t exist. So we stayed home. Earth and Mars wither under stratified gigacities, their resurrected biospheres collapsing for the last time. Mining facilities scour the moons and asteroid belt. And the Company turns inward, a sickened dynasty, growing manmade horrors in its bowels, loosing them in the System in fitful acts of carelessness and cruelty.

60. Space is a crowded sea. Alongside hyperspace travel came impossibly powerful engine systems and plummeting launch costs, which put a huge menagerie of ships into service. Dockyards are teeming with vessels of all stripes. Trade goods flow from one end of the Milky Way to the other. In the dark, corporate armadas launch desperate skirmishes for control of Market Share. The Greatest Game is played in boardrooms, but it is lived on deck, and space workers have to contend with a fraying web of alliances and mergers just to get their jobs done, while ramshackle privateer fleets drift in constant search of Authorized Prey.

61. Space is the biggest desert. Resupply is always a long way away, so vessels and equipment have to be repaired over and over again. The world is rough.  Everything needs constant maintenance. The life that persists out here has adapted for challenging conditions. That includes people, their bodies loaded up with wetware and chrome to make them void-ready and capable of survival on strange worlds. Everything is a game of resources. And patience.

62. Sex is hyper-commodified, and surrounded culturally by layers of ads and purchases. It is shameful to hook up without first buying your partner a gift and sharing your favorite goods and services, and to go without toys, augmentations, and the latest pornography playing is seen as a humiliating letdown. The body alone is not enough.

63. Sex is all-but-eradicated. Children are cultivated in fruiting exo-wombs. Stress and chemical exposure have wrecked most folks’ reproductive systems. Having sex is considered a fringe pastime and a waste of precious energy and attention. Pleasure, in general, is a luxury increasingly reserved for Managers, C-Levels, and Noble Houses.

64. Food is cheap and mostly sucks. Recycling Organs groan beneath every hab, excreting a nutrient-rich paste derived from algae, insects, and fungus which underpins most offworld cuisine. It’s edible, but barely, and the budgets for most settlements, stations, and ships aren’t allocated to much more. It would be inefficient. You understand.

65. Food is fuel, nothing more. Workers are fed through an umbilical by Company-supplied NutriPaks, which provide a drip feed of calories and electrolytes to eliminate the need for meal breaks.

66. Food is a delicacy. Colonists and offworld crews eat mostly dehydrated rations, with seasoned, unprocessed meals for celebrations and special occasions. It is a rare link back to thousands of years of human culture and survival. Good food is savored, and treated with a sort of reverence. The rich, of course, have plenty to eat, and consume and discard in excess.

67. Food is indoctrination. You are what you eat, and you are The Company. All meal packs are made in brand-compliant designs, and specially engineered for the minimum working needs of contractors and employees. The flavor palette is cultivated to evoke the kind of grim compliance favored by Rimspace managers.

68. Food is a strange buffet. Ten thousand cultures and more were scattered to the Rim, where they split and recombined, syncretized and adapted. Custom bioforms, grown for exoplanet use, provide the foundation for whole new cuisines, pulling together fruiting bodies, vat-grown organs, tendrils, and exobiological plant matter into unconventional local specialties.

69. Shelter is communal and hivelike. Crews sleep in humming cells, hot-racking when overcrowded. Showers, lounges, and mess halls are shared, privacy is a precious commodity, a total afterthought in mainstream architecture and design. Berthing areas smell like bodies, stale sweat, cheap scrub, and medicated vapors. They buzz with slow talk, muttering and speaking in vaccpig and coded slang to beat the surveillance recorders.

70. Shelter is a privilege. Most spacers sleep in their uniforms, huddling under insulated polyfiber ponchos in work areas, between shifts. All their gear comes with them in carryall bags. The rest is rented from the Company. Only True Citizens are given a permanent places to stay, earned through decades of loyal service and many donated paychecks.

71. Shelter is a little paradise. One of the few places you can get a break from Company Oversight. Cramped hab units are vigorously personalized with all kinds of trinkets and decorations, run off work printers or gathered in various ports of call. An un-customized space has been ceded to the Company. Don’t trust the freaks that leave it standard issue. That’s collaborator shit.

72. Shelter is a means for survival. It is well stocked with tools, equipment, and rations. Everything is built to hold up to harsh conditions for years. Chances are, it cannot be replaced. You carve out little comforts where you can, but simple things like body heat and oxygen take overwhelming precedence. Ventilation wheezes thinly. Wall panels are heavily insulated, grimy, and bare. Appliances and utensils are simple and utilitarian. Nothing else lasts out here.

73. Shelter is transient and uncertain. Hotels, hostels, and work-berths are common, permanent habitats much less so. Having a place to stay is rarely assured for longer than a week or two. It’s better for profit. Planetary conditions often demand nomadic travel, whether aboard crawling factories, robotic mounts, airships, rovers, local xenoforms, or on foot. Terraforming creates brutally turbulent weather conditions, as a new atmosphere is catalyzed, and in most cases results in a world that’s only marginally habitable after budgets run out or calculations are made based on bad data.

74. Shelter is a dream gone sour. Huge habitats spiral into the ground. Each family has been sold a mythic approximation of domestic bliss, but the elevator from the surface brought them down into a quiet and stifling consumer-prison. Windows open into hallways illuminated only by the sallow glow of advertising displays and impossible digital vistas. Colorful home-goods crack and decay. A billion bodies, packed in tight, until they can barely breathe. Automated management sets the music, the cycle of ersatz daylight, the air supply — all based on a suite of faulty sensors. Autonomous malls sprawl across many decks, largely abandoned, or infested with runaway strains of mealweed. Fantastic digital worlds unfold inward, lit in phantasmagoric color. Pure fantasy, calibrated to pacify and intoxicate. Folks find cleaner ways to catch a break, too, but it’s tough.

75. Androids were people once. No longer. They sold their cerebellum to the Company in exchange for stable employment. Whatever crawls in there now, it isn’t human, and it loves the Company. No wonder their coworkers find them unsettling.

76. Androids are the perfect employees, born into corporate confinement, raised on a steady diet of stimulants and Company indoctrination, and shaped by surgical steel to suit a ruthless aesthetic standard. They are humanity perfected, and in that they are alienated. It is a tragic and lonely thing to be: all surface, always.

77. Androids are corpseworkers. The bodies of deceased employees with debts left to pay are repurposed for as long as they will last, with the addition of a cheap electric heart and brain, administered rapidly after death if possible. They do not feel pain. They do not have memories. They bear the faces of the dead, and cheerfully work themselves into a second death.

78. Androids are pale and skeletal, a string of microcomputers encased in fiberglass. They don’t breathe, they don’t eat, they don’t sleep, and the Company is watching from behind their empty eye sockets.

79. The Company is a Church that worships Holy Profit. Their litanies are inscribed on the hulls of a million ships, gliding pilgrims to the raw and bloody edge of civilization, where the Terminal Feast is underway.

80. Hyperspace is entanglement. The simple and profane act of being — for a blighted eternity — two places at once. Within that space, distance frays and unwinds. Hallways stretch and curl. Planetary surfaces splice and join, flickering into co-location. And then it is done. The form collapses, time has passed quicker than the eye, and you’re there. In the drive, a warp core smokes and crumbles, all its energy spent.

81. The Company isn’t real. It’s an unconfirmed report, alluded to on talknet boards, assembled from fragmentary evidence, and used to scare children and new hires. There are a million interlocking corporations, in constant competition for budget allocation and market share, without any collective goal. Only a long and desperate struggle in the light of distant stars.

82. The Company is a conspiracy. It operates beneath the surface of Standard Operations, and to work directly for the Company is to step into a world of black operations, off-the-books research, and clandestine recon for an inscrutable non-entity.

83. Androids are synthetic humans, bioengineered to overcome our “flaws.”They are photosynthetic, breathe carbon dioxide, cannot feel pain, and self-adapt to a variety of gravitational conditions.

84. Androids are people who have crossed a blurry line of augmentation into post-humanity. Each has a wildly individual mod load, ranging from genetweaks to cyberware to implanted neo-organs to surgical transformation to xenoform symbiosis, made to meet the demands of their environment or subculture.

85. Communication is patchy. Entanglement can be achieved, but only with precisely calibrated arrays, with a minimum of magnetic interference, and the right alignment. Longcomms are widespread in the Core, but Rim systems may only have a single working array, if that, and years may pass between Contact Windows.

86. Humanity is overgrown. Many trillions are piled across the Core worlds, millions making their way out to the Rim in search of work and reduced regulation. They’ll find both, among a huge variety of cultures and languages, flourishing on constructed reefs and mound cities.

87. Humanity is lost. Communications break down over the gulfs jumpspace can cross. Nobody knows the big picture. Maybe there are millions of living systems, in an invisible. Maybe there is only a handful. It is hard to tell. Space is big. It opened its mouth to us and we were swallowed.

88. Humanity is tiny. We were never meant to live in space, and flounder in the Silent Dark while our homeworld chokes to death at the center of a once-crowded core. We cannot live like this, so we are dying. Against the Company’s ever-pressing needs and the slow cruelty of radiation and microgravity, our bodies are breaking down. We are a tiny point of light, about to flicker out.

89. The Company is an Empire, rigid and upright. Its legions hang in wait for a New War, to carry them to patriotic victory. Its Noble Houses squabble for prestige and attention. Independent polities are shadowed always by the threat of invasion, and sub-governments toil under the Imperial yoke, all to bring wealth up the Great Ladder, towards Human Ascension.

90. The Company is an absent god. It communicates at great distance, through its self-proclaimed Prophets and Representatives, who provide true and correct procedures for the acquisition and distribution of material resources. They’ll send it outward, to the Company, as they’ve sworn a sacred vow to do. And many earthly riches will fall upon the most productive at the rightful time. Be patient.

91. Space is a small garden. Other stars lie forever out of reach, and long-term survival isn’t possible except within an ever-shifting harmony with our environment. So we have settled in for the long haul. Habs drip with carefully cultivated plant-life. LEO is filled with growing stations, squirming with custom bioforms and silicon life. Horrors lurk deep within access tunnels, abandoned ships, unexplored canyons, and pre-human ruins — and humanity itself, of course.

92. Space is a toxic jungle. It is lively beyond our wildest imagination. Clouded worlds conceal spiraling forests of fungal growth, rocky worlds are crammed with lakes and caves, and riotous biospheres thick with spores and bacteria emerge on all but the most inhospitable planetoids, often as hazardous as they are exquisite.

93. Shelter is a contested space. Every cubic centimeter is precious. There is constant conflict between departments to get the space you need. Workers and families are often forced into suffocating conditions, and push back with riots and barricades. Evictions are violent, with armed Clearance Units conducting forceful removals to clear space for expanded industry.

94. Medicine is hyper-automated. Self-replicating hospital stations sprawl out, their retrieval servitors scouring for the injured, sick, and dying, to lift them aboard, take them apart, and put them back together again. Sometimes wrong. They learn with each new patient, and have begun the creation of new kinds of life from the pieces they have gathered.

95. The Company is yet to form. Before it came a withering Republic, devoted to Progress and Discovery, which scattered unto the stars great expedition fleets and brought peace to ten thousand worlds. Only a few ancient ships remain now, carrying wondrous technology and determined crews into contact with the strangest sights the universe has to spit back at them.

96.  Medicine is a solved problem. Weaving broken flesh and bone together on a rattling MedLoom is a simple, if agonizing, process. Automeds are mass-produced and widely distributed. In this way the Company provides for all its Valued Contractors, enabling them to destroy their bodies day after day, mission after mission, and be put back together again. And again. And again.

97. Shelter is slow and earthen. It is made in the old way, from natural material, and kept low tech. There are too many points of failure otherwise, and humanity has been a spacefaring civilization for millennia now out of a prehistoric resilience, operating on a scale of generations. Advanced comms equipment is entwined with megalithic post-and-lintel courtyards and mound-dwellings. The Company’s slick habs are an aberration, almost to be pitied. They will not last like mud and stone.

98. Humanity is united with the cosmos on a visceral level. To survive, we have brought the world into ourselves, and have bled out into the world. Cradles buzz with raw cell-matter, ready to assemble New Forms for the next colonial surge. Plants grow from noses and mouths. Human heads, furred and fanged, sit atop beasts of burden. Digitigrade spacers maintain the beating engine nacelles of a dropship. Enfleshed flowers bloom on terraformed worlds, all surfaces made in the image of their new creators, runaway biology enriched by fertilizers and precise construction.

99. The Company marches through the ash-caked wreckage of an interstellar war. Calamitous war machines plow through slouching blockhabs, garlanded in limbs and ammunition. Biomass harvesters eat the dead and injured to reconstitute into podgrown abominations. Drone swarms scour kill-zones for survivors. Cruelly engineered pathogens boil beneath the skin. And though it all, the Company’s contractors stalk in ragged columns against rival divisions in an internal struggle for funding and promised salvation.

100. Hyperspace is a hadal sea without end or surface. Salt water, like the First Sea, hanging in an abyss of pure, wet dark. Ships slide, bubbling, through the depthless hollow, sonar pricked for any signature. Leviathans are here in waiting sleep, titanic bodies slick and layered. Wreckage floats in permanent equilibrium, compartments swarmed by formless plankton, corpses changed to undulating ghosts by the invasion of tiny polyps and colony particles. It is the traditional burial place for fallen voidworkers, forever and finally out of reach of the Company.