(The Hunt )
world documentation
planetology
Snowflake:
Alpha Centauri Beta 2
.924 g surface gravity
atmosphere - Nitrogen (74%) - Oxygen (19%) - Helium (2%) - CO2, CH4, H2O, H2
2.7 degrees axial tilt - seasons are mild, but not meaningless.
.79 AU orbit - 341 Earth days, outer edge of the water zone
27.1 hour rotation
74% sea coverage, counting ice caps over polar oceans
Planetary temps are somewhat lower than Earth, and despite the large oceans weather is also milder, or
at least mostly less exciting. Occasional tropical storms. Largish ice caps dominate the poles. The
local long-term climate does not appear to generate ice ages. The continental plates are more brittle
than on Earth, resulting in lots of mini-continents, mostly on the scale of half-an-Australia. There are
plenty of island chains as well, but the amplitude of the mantle flow is lower and hot spots don't push
as many volcanoes up as one might expect. The few really-high mountains on this planet are due
mostly to plate collisions causing massive upthrust.
History
Snowflake got its name in 2153, when EQS Nike - the second starship built on Earth (the first went
straight back to Epsilon Eridani with many of the older Reds) - was approaching the system and
Princess Mallet saw the early survey shots from high above the south pole. Between the ice cap and
the bright-white landmasses, it probably did look like a snowflake rotating about its axis. The
planetary scientists on board told her repeatedly that the lower-latitude islands were not frozen and
something else must be going on, but Mallet insisted, and as mission commander she had the clout to
make it stick.
Given its gravity and abundant water, Snowflake was always considered to be a good candidate for
eventual colonization despite early concerns about the local flora and its chemistry. Orbital stations
were set up in 2198 by the second-generation fleet constructors, but not the larger-scale fleet facilities
that were sent to Keid and 61 Cygni - there wasn't anything else in that direction worth heading out to.
The ecological politics of the 23rd century combined with the Hierarchy's lengthening perception of
time scales pushed the focus to the Keid terraforming project, but a long-term experimental station was
established at Snowflake in 2230 to determine what would happen - both to settlers as well as the local
biosphere - if colonization did take place. Results looked good from the start, but nothing was done to
advance the project for more than a century.
When Queen Michiko ascended in 2399, she instituted a number of large programs meant to "wake up"
a culture she felt had become moribund. The biggest one was the expansion of the interstellar space
program. From her (young - she was only 35) perspective, the Keid terraforming was making
essentially no progress, and the scientists informed her that there were only marginal prospects for a
self-sustaining colony within her lifetime. Snowflake would be viable immediately for what she
considered to be a "real colony". There were planets which matched Earth biology better, but the
closest one was at Delta Pavonis, nearly 20 LY away. Simply in terms of the communication and
transport lag, that was thought to be too far out for a fast colonization effort and would require far too
much of the Hierarchy's limited human resources to be constantly en route to or from the colony.
Even then, the colony fleet was a projected thirty year build. There was an incredible amount of
redundancy which they felt was needed to deal with ecological contingencies and the ships built were
the largest ever, particularly the main transport vehicle which was constructed out of a near-earth
asteroid almost a kilometer in diameter. In 2410, another of the Queen's new research projects paid off
and the Magical Instantaneous Communication System was developed. This meant that there would be
zero time lag for notifying Earth of any problems, half the transport lag they had been planning for, and
zero time lag for solutions Earth could send back to be implemented using local resources The colony
fleet ended up launching almost ten years early and well under-budget, and the first truly permanent
human settlement was founded in 2425.
The colony fleet returned to Earth, and has been used to ferry in large groups of new colonists and
supplies on a nine-year cycle. On its first and second arrival it dropped off 20,000 people, then
underwent a refit to change a large part of its cargo capacity into passenger space and has brought
35,000 colonists on almost every return since. The regular twice-a-year starship arrivals also bring
colonists, though only a small fraction of what the giant colony ship brings.
Due to the high level of ultraviolet light on Snowflake, the first-generation colonists (all permanent
residents brought by the first three flights of the colony ship) were genetically altered to have darker
skin (they mostly turned out a milk-chocolaty brown). These changes were inheritable, and so while
many later colonists opted out of the modification once the medical facilities needed to treat the
resulting cancers were established, the average Snowflake citizen today is browner than their racial
background would predict. Between the UV levels and the cooler environment, most colonists wear
relatively thick, all-covering clothing. Hats and even bonnets have cycled in and out of fashion.
Everyone brings sunglasses when they arrive on the colony ship, but eventually they get scratched or
break and the local manufacturing is only now (2490) starting to make quality replacements, which are
expensive.
The colonists were drawn from all parts of the Earth, though as back home in the Earth Confederation
the population is dominated by those of Japanese and North American descent. The Hierarchy would
have preferred to simply install an extension of their Japanese almost-monarchy. However, relations
with the Duchy of Chicago were at an ebb in the 2410's and Queen Michiko decided that it would be a
good gesture to model the colonial administration after the American government. Duchess Paint,
formerly Earth Confederation Minister of Education, would be the colony's executive with a classical
American all-elected bicameral legislature that would create the laws and budgets and could override
her.
The colony fleet's arrival and the establishment of the Malletfall spaceport were an intricate,
checklisted ballet that had been planned over a span of decades. Everything that all twenty-one
thousand of the colonists, spacer crews, and science teams did was scripted to ensure the maximum
chance of success. If they failed, if something went spectacularly wrong, Earth was close enough in
fasttime that everyone could be rescued... until the main colony ship left to pick up the next load of
colonists, at which point less than five percent of them could be evacuated. The spaceport was laid out
in composocrete, allowing larger ships to land. These brought down the food stores, prefabricated
buildings, antimatter grid array, and everything else needed to make a permanent city, then while all the
colonists were assembling the parts, they brought down seed stock, livestock, and agricultural
implements.
The fleet brought eight months worth of food. Once that was exhausted, the colony would have to
survive on what it could grow. A few trial farms were established immediately, but it was six weeks
later as the construction phase wrapped up that almost ninety percent of the colonists headed out of the
city they had just built to find out if they could feed themselves. The hardest part was clearing space in
the native biosphere for Earth-descended plants; they didn't dare let a bioengineered solution loose, as
they lacked the tools, manpower, and expertise to be absolutely certain it would not escape to ravage
the entire world. So it all had to be done by hand, and that took more manual labor than most of the
colonists' families had done in the last five generations combined.
The first attempts to harvest native plants started at the same time, but despite a century of experience
the research outpost had accumulated with a local diet, nobody trusted those results well enough to bet
the whole colony on them. Snowshroom and fairy pad would become staples of the Snowflake pantry
within a decade, but for the moment only the most adventurous colonists would try them.
The first harvest cycle took five months, and at the end of it everyone was exhausted, but the numbers
were clear - the colony was viable. Duchess Paint didn't make a big production of sending the colony
fleet away; in fact she didn't announce it at all. It was a few nights before anyone else noticed the fleet
was no longer visible in the sky, and then there simply wasn't time to panic. They all had work to do, if
they were going to get a second harvest in before local winter.
That sums up the earliest years of the colony very well - everyone farms, everyone works, and with
everyone's efforts, they all survived. And there certainly were challenges. The first decades of the
colony's history reads like a series of bad disaster movies: 2428: earthquake. 2430-2431: plague.
2436: typhoon. 2439: earthquake. 2442: smaller typhoon, lots of flooding. 2443-2446: plague. 2446:
bigger earthquake.
Malletfall, the original capital city of the Snowflake colony and even now the only spaceport, had been
placed on the edge of the largest freshwater lake on the planet. What was not fully appreciated until
well after settlement was that the lake had formed at the pivot point where one mini-continent was
rotating against another continental plate. It had been relatively quiet in the century before the colony
landed, and even once they started most of the quakes were only in the 6.5 range, but the expanding
colony was not building with modern materials and methods and so the destruction was magnified far
beyond what equivalent quakes on Earth would have caused.
The typhoons, on the other hand, were expected. Truly giant tropical storms are uncommon due to the
lower sea surface temperatures, but almost two centuries of weather satellite data showed that most of
the continents would get hit by a dangerous storm about once a decade on average. Again, the
relatively weak colony structures resulted in disproportionately high property damage, but since the
storms could be tracked and alerts posted before landfall loss of life was low.
Going in, the largest worry among planners was what would happen when Earth and Snowflake
microbiologies started interacting. The experimental station had never encountered harmful local
microbes, but they had observed that a few could survive in Earth species. It was considered inevitable
that the massive expansion of Terran contact with Snowflake biomes would result in something
harmful jumping to the human population, and in 2430, something did.
That first plague resembled a transmissible form of botulism. It was fatal in about 30% of cases, and
while there were treatments which could temporarily mitigate its effects there was no cure until mid2431 and even then they could only manufacture a hundred doses a week. Each untreated person who
caught it lived or died purely on the adaptability of their immune system. By the time it subsided,
almost 8% of the colonists had died and birth rates had almost flatlined since infants were especially
vulnerable. It took almost five years before the colony got back to the 5% natural growth rate it had
achieved prior to the plague. As the years went on, "white botulism" became a typical (though not
universal) childhood disease. There are only a few fatalities a year, mostly among farmstead families
on the fringes who can not get to treatment in time.
2443 brought the second return of the colony fleet, its first arrival with expanded passenger capacity.
The thirty-five thousand new colonists were a huge new concentration of humans unadapted to
Snowflake, and the disease which would change the course of Snowflake's political history jumped
right into that gap.
The "Flake Flu" is caused by a bacteria-like organism which the human immune system has little
trouble adapting to over a span of three to five days. The death of those bacteria, however, releases its
genetic material into surrounding tissues. Everyone whose immune system has not seen any exposure
to Snowflake viruses (which can not infect Earth biologies, but still enter colonists' bodies all the time)
experience an out-of-control immune response to that harmless genetic material. Quite literally, their
own bodies try to kill them.
The first stage of the disease, the bacterial infection, is very mild - there is occasionally a fever, and
fatigue is a common symptom. Many victims don't even notice it. This lasts for a day or three (during
which the victim is contagious), and then the second stage hits. This is essentially sudden-onset
pneumonia - internal swelling and filling of the lungs that goes from zero to can't-breathe in about
twelve hours. Second stage flake flu will kill within a day if not treated with strong
immunosuppressant medications and usually some sort of breathing assistance. Of course, knocking
down someone's immune system has its own risks, and what is referred to as "third stage flake flu" is
really just whatever opportunistic infections crop up, some of which are themselves fatal.
Colonists adapted to Snowflake biology have a range of responses to this disease. Almost half will
simply kill the bacteria off before it breeds up to a large enough concentration for its death to trigger
the second stage. Some will have no reaction or a mild reaction to the bacterial remains. But about
20% suffer the full-strength reaction and can be killed by the flake flu. Virtually none will get sick at
all without exposure to the sort of bacterial load that can only be transmitted by another infected
human.
It took almost three months before the proper course of treatment was determined, and even then the
illness continued to spread since it is so hard to detect during its contagious phase. The legislature
dithered about proper quarantine procedure, prolonging the crisis, and resentment against the new
arrivals rose. The locals didn't really have anything against the newcomers, but they didn't much want
them living next door either. There were some ugly scenes out in the plains with new settlers being
turned away at gunpoint. Unrest in Malletfall hadn't quite reached the point of riots by the time the
plague burned out in 2445, but administrative steps were taken to get some experienced security
leadership on the next routine starship to Snowflake. Five percent of the population was dead,
including almost 12% of the arriving colonists.
A larger earthquake in 2446 did a good job of unifying the new and old colonists while knocking down
the last of the early substandard construction in Malletfall. Despite all the crises, the colony was
progressing faster than the planners had anticipated. Much of this was due to high agricultural yields
and the adoption of local foodstuffs freeing up labor to build infrastructure and the beginnings of local
manufacturing. Many of the first wave colonists had received extensive training in preindustrial trades
before leaving Earth, but enough technology was getting delivered that by mid-century there was
barely any need for blacksmiths or full-time manual tailors or surveyors.
Malletfall was becoming a real city, rather than just a sprawling cluster of prefab and hand-built onestory cabins. The spaceport had always been fully-modern construction, but now a downtown with
multistory, electrified, and earthquakeproofed buildings was springing up next to the terminal. Rail
lines into the expanding farm belts and mining camps to the north were run, and even in the
countryside small towns began to form, uniting the farmsteads formerly scattered randomly about the
plain.
Almost unnoticed, Princess Football arrived on the second starship of 2449 to take over the colony's
security apparatus. Football was one of the first North American Ladies to gain acceptance in the upper
echelons of the Tokyo-Earth Hierarchy in the early Twenty-third Century. She was one of Duchess
Sakura's last proteges, and made a name for herself in the Earth Confederation Ministry of Security as
an utter hardass. She was almost singlehandedly responsible for destroying the Korean insurgency in
2239, and it was on her initiative that Mecca was (re-)flattened in 2388. She had been considered for
the role of Minister of Security several times, but was passed over due to the controversy her
appointment would cause.
Princess Football had been planning on taking a couple of (interstellar) Naval tours of duty to see the
sights and let her investments on Earth grow, then moving onto semi-retirement for the last decades of
her life. Instead, she got drafted for colony duty. She wasn't too happy about it, but loyalty to the
Hierarchy was what she'd built her entire adult life around so she sucked it up and threw herself
headlong into this unexpected curtain call.
Before she arrived, there were essentially two security forces on Snowflake: the Malletfall civil police
force - much-expanded while Football was in transit but still only 160 strong - and a loosely-organized
team of a dozen Ladies who, when needed, would lead investigations or provide firepower for the
police. When the whole colony was just a medium-sized town there really wasn't a need for more, but
now the population was in sight of 200,000 and there were humans strewn over a quarter of the
minicontinent. The Tokyo-Earth security services were the stuff of legend on three planets, and
Football's instinct was to copy as much as she could from that organization... but on a colony world,
with a massive lack of personnel, training, and especially MG's, compromises were necessary.
With no competing nations or nationalities, there was no need for a formal intelligence agency. Those
functions got wrapped into the investigative force, and she used all her clout (and eventually some of
her own money) to recruit veteran agents to come with her from Earth. This agency would change the
most over the decades to come, but it was ready to hit the ground running.
The colony needed a paramilitary service with enough mobility to reach into the countryside and
enough firepower to deal with a rural population that had plenty of guns stocked away. The new
Snowflake Guard got a good deal on four used, armored Confed hovercraft (some assembly required,
please wait four years for delivery), and Football recruited about two hundred young women and men
from the colony to form strike forces crewing and deploying from that hardware. Even after she had
that core force level she kept recruiting, though a little differently. The Guard Reserve is not the elite
force that the core companies are intended to be, but are instead chosen for loyalty first, then
competence.
Finally, Football pressed Duchess Paint to finally force the coalescing towns in the plains and the
budding city at Escalator to create formal police departments. The initial push into the countryside had
been a community-wide effort with lots of good feelings involved. The spirit of independence and trust
of those early years was a tangible thing, but it was being overwhelmed by growth and circumstance
and Paint and the legislature were reluctant to acknowledge that. Football was able to push the law
through in 2451, but her style and what many felt was a lack of respect for colonist culture made far too
many enemies in both houses of the legislature in the process.
Then, as the political turbulence was just starting to subside, the colony fleet arrived with the next
35,000 colonists in mid-2452. There had been petitions circulating for years proposing that new
arrivals be quarantined immediately on landfall, and nearly forty percent of the population had signed
at least one. The colonists from the last colony fleet arrival even polled in favor of the idea. However,
Duchess Paint disliked the optics of confining almost a sixth of the people on the planet. The
legislators were even more unwilling to imprison that many future constituents, all of whom were
going to be on the voting rolls (close to 21% of the electorate) just a year less a day after landing.
A month before their arrival Princess Football was interviewed by the the main Malletfall news site,
and when asked about the issue she surprisingly opined that quarantine probably was the best policy.
Then she went on to point out that it was far, far too late to be deciding the issue, since the logistics of
an extended quarantine for that many people ("What do you feed them? Where do they live? Do we
have that many porta-johns on Snowflake?") needed to be worked out years in advance, preferably
even before the fleet left Earth. That settled the argument for the moment, but the next three months
were incredibly tense as the fleet arrived, the new colonists disembarked and began finding their places
in the new world, the medical staff stocked up on caffeine, and everyone waited for someone to get
sick.
Just when people were beginning to relax, the flake flu came back. The 2452 variety was not much
different from the last round, but the increasing population density gave the bug more chances to
spread during the hard-to-detect contagious phase. By the time the first cases needed hospitalization,
there were approximately 150 people infected. By the time all of those victims needed assistance
breathing, there were three thousand first-stage infections. Anyone who could read a graph could see
the crisis coming - there simply were not going to be enough hospital beds in the colony to treat
everyone, and the second-stage cases who did not get treatment were likely to die.
The only answer was a colony-wide lockdown - human contact outside one's family simply had to stop.
Duchess Paint put out the order, and everyone huddled at home. Logistically and economically, this
solution was untenable for any period longer than ten days or so - people needed to maintain colony
infrastructure, to raise crops, to do the things that keep society functioning. Still, compared to the
typical incubation/contagion phase of the disease, it was long enough that the immediate crisis was
averted and infection rates dropped.
That first wave of infection resulted in nearly four thousand deaths, again concentrated in the newly
arrived colonist population. As soon as the quarantine was lifted, the Malletfall streets were jammed
with protesters clamoring once again for isolation of the newcomers. Violence directly against new
colonists rose, but the newly-chartered police forces did a good job of restraining the worst excesses.
The flake flu continued to sputter through the population, with each new cluster of cases goading the
political unrest. The infection curve never went geometric again, but by the end of the year as the
legislature continued to dither the citizens of Malletfall finally got fed up with their inaction.
The organized group of five hundred or so protesters who stormed the legislature on December 21,
2452 were not, by any stretch of the imagination, revolutionaries. They planned to occupy the
legislative chamber an hour or two and theatrically pass a mock bill that would impose a three percent
tax on all citizens of Snowflake to fund a seven-month isolation camp for all newcomers, both current
and future, arriving with the main colony fleet. The motives of the estimated five thousand
unorganized protesters who showed up when news of the takeover spread were less obvious, and there
were some unfortunate clashes - resulting in two deaths - with the Malletfall Police who had arrived on
the scene reacting to the initial takeover.
There is no kind way to describe Duchess Paint's reaction to the sudden crisis. She had spent her career
in the the urbane, utterly safe environs of Tokyo-Earth, and made that career in the ministry with the
least exposure to violence - Education. It had been nearly a century since she had spent any time in the
Tokyo-Earth SDF, and if she had ever learned any lessons about appropriate responses to civilian
crowds, she apparently forgot them.
Paint told Football to disperse the crowd - not contain, not prevent them from doing more damage, but
to force them out of the street. Princess Football objected, emphasizing the violence that would be
required to do so, but Paint did not want to hear it and was in fact already angry with Football,
convinced that the interview the Princess had given months ago had led to the current situation. Paint
cut her off, and Ordered her - a magical order given with the authority granted by her rank, which
Football was incapable of disobeying - to immediately use the Snowflake Guard to disperse the crowd.
Princess Football couldn't resist the Order, but she could plan ahead for what she saw as its inevitable
aftermath. She sent all four hovercraft to Congressional Square, but only Alpha and Proxima
Companies. Sol Company she designated to guard the Guard armory, and Beta Company was sent to
the spaceport with orders to hold the MICS broadcast station and Malletfall communications hub there
at any cost. The Reserve was also fully activated for the first time.
When the Guard arrived at Congressional Square, Paint was already there with an ad hoc team of
Ladies. The crowd was not reacting well to her berating them, particularly since they felt her policies
were part of the problem. She demanded the Guard move on the crowd immediately, and Football
ordered the hovercraft forward. Paint herself led the charge into the crowd, and when the inevitable
shooting and mass panic started, the Duchess was one of the inevitable fatalities. The Guard was
horribly outnumbered, and there were plenty of weapons in the crowd. Eventually the mob was
dispersed - Football literally had no choice but to see that through - but at the cost of most of the two
companies she brought and 652 civilian deaths. News of the incident spread instantly throughout the
colony, and thousands more took to the streets to protest, to protect the mock government at the
legislature, and to chase new colonists out of the city.
By the time Football got to the spaceport, the colony was in a borderline state of revolt. She got on
MICS and into a live conversation with Queen Michiko. The transcript of that call has never been
released, but when it was done Football was the colony's Duchess, martial law declared, the legislature
disbanded, and direct aristocratic rule by the Hierarchy put into place.
Duchess Football's first order of business was to get Malletfall back under control before anything truly
important - like the spaceport complex, or the central hospital facilities and warehouses - got broken.
Her force at the armory had held its own long enough for the Reserves to start arriving, When they had
a force of five hundred gathered, she had them move out into the streets with orders to stop looting,
take any new arrivals into "protective custody", politely disarm anyone carrying weapons in the streets
(though not to force them home, yet), and to keep a protective watch over the demonstrations at the
legislature. While they got started, Football and Queen Michiko started recording messages asking the
populace to calm down and gather back at Congressional Square or watch the video feeds of the event
there for further announcements.
It was almost midnight before things settled down enough for Football to make her appearance there.
When she ascended the steps of the legislature to speak, there was a lot of angry shouting from the
crowd since they knew she had to be involved with the deadly clash earlier. Duchess Football's speech
didn't do a lot to quell that anger, but she made absolutely certain that everyone watching knew what
had happened and what was going to happen next:
Football talked the crowd through everything that she had seen that day - Paint's meltdown, the Orders
which she was forced to see through, the current military situation - and then dumped the collective EI
logs from the Ladies who witnessed it all to a public server. She explained how the Queen's directive
changed things on the planet: no more Legislature, period. There would eventually be local rule of
small cities and towns, and advisory city councils in larger cities, but the Hierarchy was ultimately in
charge.
And then she told them what was going to happen in regard to the current crisis: Anyone back in their
homes in the next four hours would not be charged with any crimes, even if they were involved in the
violence earlier. All the new arrivals would be gathered up and quarantined for at least four months but taxes would have to be raised eight percentage points that year to counterbalance the massive
expenditure needed to support a sixth of the population who would suddenly be doing nothing for the
colony, as well as to compensate the newcomers for all that wasted time. That tax burden would
decrease in the future, but not go away entirely, since it would be financing a permanent facility that
would quarantine future waves of colonists.
For most people there, that was enough. They got an apology, the person most responsible for the
violence was dead, and the quarantine issue was resolved the way they had wanted it, even if it was
going to hurt a little to get it done. The crowds did go home, the funerals were somber but not angry,
and while there was some unpleasantness rounding up the new colonists it did not flare up into a fullfledged uprising.
For a small minority, though, the sudden and complete destruction of democratic society began a new
chapter of unhappiness. It took several months to sink in - even most of the other Ladies present at
Congressional Square thought things were going to revert back to normal after the quarantine period but as time went on and it became clear that Duchess Football was never going to (and when
interviewed on the subject, claimed she could not) reconstitute the legislature a real resistance
movement formed. The Snowflake Democratic Society (unfortunately abbreviated "SDS") began as a
wholly political organization. Its founders were idealists, and they wanted their ideal society back,
darnit.
Quarantine turned out to be an unpleasant place to be for the first few weeks. There really were not
enough portable latrines on the planet, the buildings were nothing more than improvised tents with no
heating, and nobody had anything to do except get sick and blog about how miserable they were.
There was one nasty wave of flake flu at the beginning of 2453 that struck every resident in two of the
dozen mini-camps the new arrivals had been clustered into. Quick and ruthless lockdowns of the
camps prevented it from spreading farther, and more than 70% of the affected residents got sufficient
treatment to survive, but it was another two thousand deaths. The wider colony, horrified by the EI
footage uploaded from the camps, began donating huge amounts of time and money to alleviating the
hardship of the quarantine experience, and five months later when the not-so-newbies were released
they were reasonably unembittered.
Duchess Football held onto every last bit of autocratic power she could for the next decade. The small
plains towns ultimately did keep their own local governments, but the six largest cities on the planet
were turned into fiefdoms of six Ladies who reported in turn to the Duchess. (This number has
remained the same even as the colony grew and cities grew at differing rates. It's always the six largest
cities ruled this way, and some years the affected cities change. There is talk about eventually
increasing this number, but that would require importing more Ladies.)
Football kept her administration of the colony moderately populist, responding quickly to problems as
they came up, and not doing much to rock the boat. On the other hand, she used the Guard to crush any
whiff of violent resistance to her rule. Her reputation became that of a friendly, but fearsome dictator.
One could tell her that you wished she wasn't in charge, and she would nod and agree with that
proposition, but organizing a protest or even discussing some sort of notional revolutionary activity
would get you an involuntary ticket on the next SPIAR ship returning to Earth.
The one major, idiosyncratic change she did make came in 2459. The regional faults were seismically
active again, and the Duchess (when asked later what prompted the move) got sick of earthquakes
waking her up in the middle of the night. She declared that the planetary capital was moving
somewhere it could coordinate rescue services from rather than needing those services itself. Her
government and the Snowflake Guard (but not the SBI) moved to the largest city in the plains, which
she renamed Michiko after the Queen.
Building Quarantine City was not cheap by any means - Football insisted that it needed to be
comfortable as well as functional, and in the end it became the first tourist/holiday destination on
Snowflake. Most of its customers were locals, but it also hosted a few transient scientists, spacer
Ladies and sometimes crews waiting a year or three for their connecting ships to arrive, and the very,
very few who were both wealthy enough to buy a seat on a starship and willing to miss nine years of
slowtime. Q City never broke even since it needed to shut down two years out of nine for conversion
to, use as, and conversion back from hospital status, but by the second fleet cycle it was in operation
the tax burden on the average citizen was down to 0.7%, which most deemed an acceptable cost.
The colony fleet arrived in 2461, and the new arrivals disembarked directly into Q-City. There were a
few outbreaks of the flake flu during the six month quarantine which resulted in localized lockdowns,
but no deaths. The worst complaint anyone made was that they were bored, and most appreciated the
free vacation. The colony collectively shrugged, metaphorically embraced the newcomers, and got
back into the business of growing.
After the 2461 fleet cycle Duchess Football began to loosen her grip on power just a little. Elections
were held in the direct-ruled cities in 2463 - but the only candidates allowed were Ladies. A planetary
ballot began in 2465 in which citizen petitions were voted on. Duchess Football was only obligated to
"consider" the winning initiatives, but she implemented most with only minor tweaking for legal clarity
and the ones which she wholly did not agree with usually still resulted in some sort of policy
compromise. The SDS leaders of a protest on the fifteenth anniversary of derepublicization were
shocked when they were not arrested and deported, though they did get a stern lecture from the SBI
about what sort of rhetoric would not be tolerated.
Each return of the colony fleet marked an inflection point in Snowflake's development, and not just
because of the bumps in population. Far more important was the equipment that each return delivered.
The colony was bootstrapping through centuries of technological development faster than the planners
had expected and each time the fleet came back that development shifted into the next gear. The 2443
arrival had delivered the tools and facilities which turned the prospecting settlements around Escalator
into real, working mines. The calamitous 2452 arrival also delivered the pieces for a core rail system
that connected those mines to the cities, and the resulting expansion of industry was capable of
extending those rail lines into the plains and all the small farming towns. In 2461 it was machining
tools - the precision equipment which could be used to build more precision equipment and make
consumer-scale manufacturing a possibility.
The rising tide of industrialization and technology lifted all boats - quality of life rose steadily for
everyone on the planet by all metrics - but the colony-ship deliveries became more and more
contentious over the decades. The prospecting teams had carefully set up profit-sharing systems ahead
of time and anyone willing to work hard in the mines got a decent slice of the pie. The railroads
benefited everyone, but the lucky government engineers who were running the rail system when it
privatized in 2460 became truly wealthy. Machine tool distribution was heavily regulated to ensure
their use made expansion of industry possible... but it was existing industry which received those tools,
making the people running that sector fabulously rich.
The colony ship arrivals in 2470 and '79 brought robotic factory systems which were nearly the equal
of the latest technology on Earth. It was a giant leap in manufacturing capacity, but over the course of
that decade it also displaced a good chunk of the population who had staffed the growing assembly
lines. There was plenty of work still out there, much of it even paying better, but most of it also
requiring either more education than some in that generation had bothered to get or a move out of the
city and into the farm belts. For the first time in Snowflake's short history, there was a measurable
level of unemployment.
Public education had always been available on Snowflake. Everyone had an EI, which meant even the
most remote farmsteads had remote links into classrooms, not to mention (artificial) private tutors. But
when you're working a farm using nineteenth or early twentieth century technology, education past an
eighth-grade level is seen as a luxury, or a recreational activity. Higher education was never totally
missing on Snowflake - with all the Earth-educated twentysomethings arriving on the twice-yearly
ships and the colony fleet it seemed in the first decades like half the planet had postgraduate degrees.
On the other hand, there was only a single university on the planet until late in the 60's and it was
sparsely attended. EI's were progressively less capable of teaching sciences and arts at higher levels.
And the expected timeline for colony development meant that there was going to be little call for those
arts and sciences before 2500.
The increasing pace of technological advancement blew that expectation away, but it had been Duchess
Paint who was the educational expert. Duchess Football only realized what time it was when the 2470
fleet already was on its way and her staff started projecting the need for more engineers and designers.
She put in a crash program to recruit and train teachers. It paid off at the grade-school level within five
years, but high school teachers and professors - and the highly educated young women and men that
they educate - were going to be in short supply for almost two decades. Some of the first-generation
colonists were brought in to help, but far too many of them were getting into their eighties and nineties
by that time, and the higher educations of their youthful years had often lain unused for half their lives.
The 2479 colony fleet was supposed to fix that problem. Not everyone on board was a professor, but
thousands had skills or knowledge which they were expected to pass along to the youth of Snowflake.
Many would probably wind up in industry within a decade, but that was just a different forum in which
they could teach. Plenty of scientists and a fair number of engineers had emigrated to the new world
over the years, but for the first time they were accompanied by artists and writers, mathematicians and
EI technologists.
The colony ship arrived just a month before the start of a new school year. Rather than wait the extra
year to integrate all the new teachers, arrangements were made for many of them to teach the first
semester remotely from Q-City. Students all over the continent got to meet their new professors and
dig into the curriculum... and then two months later, the flake flu struck.
The 2479 strain was just slightly different than previous iterations: In 96% of the people who caught it,
the incubation/contagion phase lasted much longer - more than ten days. It spread, and spread, hopping
zones of Q City as staff sat out the isolation period after leaving one zone to head to their next
assignment. There were a few cases that popped up in the first week, but in the second week of
infections everyone in Zone 12 hit second stage. They were the lucky ones, since all of them got
treated. In the third week everyone else in Q-City, excepting the lucky 70% of the staff whose immune
systems beat it cleanly, reached second stage. There simply was not enough staff and equipment to
treat most of the sick. Of the thirty-five thousand who arrived on the colony ship, less than fifteen
thousand survived to leave quarantine.
Standard isolation procedures had contained the flake flu in Q City, but communications had never
been cut and all those remote students had an achingly personal view into the worst medical disaster in
two centuries. The entire colony ground to a halt in a collective freakout. It was worst for those too
young to fully understand the plague wasn't going to spread to their city, their family, but many of those
old enough to remember the 2452 disaster shut themselves and their families into their homes. GCP
fell 6% that year and inflation lurched upwards.
Duchess Football spent the crisis literally on the front lines. Transformed Ladies are virtually immune
to illness, so she led most of her Hierarchy colleagues into Q City to do anything and everything that
they could to help. Football was born in 2191 but had done her expected tours of duty in the Queen's
Fleet so her chronological age was only 241. Given her age when she ascended to Princess rank her
expected lifespan was roughly 260 years. She had been in good health, but her experiences those
months in Q-City seemed to literally break her heart. She was hospitalized just before the quarantine
lifted, for what has been reported in different places as a stroke, malnutrition and exhaustion, or a
nervous breakdown. Since that time she has made few public appearances and seems a pale, shrunken
shell of her former outspoken, boisterous self.
The 2481 planetary ballot passed only one petition, but that one won with 68% of voters approving.
The petition was to reduce the passenger load of the next colony fleet arrival to no more than 1000.
For the first time since she allowed petitions, the Duchess simply ignored the result. The same petition
passed in 2483, this time with 71% approval. SDS membership was growing, Snowflake Guard
recruitment was down, and polling indicated that a narrow majority of colonists wanted her replaced.
Football simply didn't have the heart to fight this issue and issued a simple press release indicating she
was scaling back the passenger capacity by three-quarters.
In the short term this helped her favorability numbers, but through the rest of the decade they tailed off
again. Football had always been autocratic, but before she fell ill she was an active presence in
Snowflake public life, explaining the hard choices she had to make and apologizing for the problems
they created. Most older colonists still trusted her, but many in the generation coming of age felt no
connection or attachment to this unseen, elderly woman who controlled their destiny.
A sizable majority of colonists were under 25 - with the colony's steady growth rate this condition was
expected to persist for centuries - and suddenly the grumpy, philosophical oldsters of the SDS found
their ranks swelling with the colony's youth. By 2486 the SDS had become a true political party,
competing in and winning a few local elections. With youth inevitably comes youthful fervor, and for a
very few it is not enough to control small-town school boards and protest in the streets. Becoming a
revolutionary on Snowflake is a brutally darwinian experience - the wrong words uttered within earshot
of the wrong person's EI will land you in a deportation hearing in less than eight hours, and Football
has no reservations about the use of deadly force against actual terrorists - but it is possible. So far as
the SBI has been able to track and penetrate this fringe they believe it is still small - some hundreds at
the most - but it is growing.
The mines north of Escalator were the first to witness an uncanny new aspect of the planetary scene in
mid-2487. When miners began to report unexplainable flashes of silvery-white light in the deepest
mineshafts no one outside the mining guild paid much attention. When EI's captured images of the
reflective blobs of nothing emitting the light and then fleeing (sometimes straight into the rock) as
humans approached the scientific community took note and set up research stations. In December a
team of miners and biologists managed to chase one of the lights out of the mine. They had expected
to trap it with a specially modified SPIAR field operated by Lady Turbulence, but it skirted the fringes
of the kinetic well and then shot straight up into the sky. Three days later, the lights disappeared from
the mines, never to return there.
Six months later, when Alpha was on the far side of Beta and Snowflake experiencing a full, true
nighttime, the lights reappeared in the skies above the plains. This time it was the farmers' turn to freak
out, but the darting, frolicking blobs almost entirely ignore humans and their antics quickly became a
minor tourist draw. The one thing that will make the silverdarts (as the farmers ended up naming them
since the scientists never got around to creating one) react is the approach of any Lady - they simply
zip away, completely avoiding her. Over the the next two years the silverdarts have slowly migrated
west towards Malletfall, but what they'll do when they find their path blocked by that concentration of
Ladies is a subject of much debate and some betting.
While humans find the silverdarts' birdlike antics amusing, the peripanthers - nearly the only large
plains animal that is able to observe the lights through the pad canopy - are completely terrified of them
and will hide when they appear. Earth-descended livestock also appear to dislike them, though not to
as great a degree, simply becoming noisy and nervous. Even the fairy pads sway away from the lights
when they approach the ground, and not due to any observable wind.
The science teams have managed to determine two things about the silverdarts: First, there are a
relatively small number of distinct entities; no more than seventy, unless they take turns hiding, and the
population is growing by one or two a month. Second, they definitely are - or are the result of - some
sort of magic. Unfortunately the inability of Ladies to observe them has prevented any useful
determination of their magical properties.
Football's change of plan for the colony fleet came as a late surprise to the Earth-based organizations
putting together the next load of colonists and technology. It didn't make much sense to send the fleet
so lightly loaded and so they did not, but the conversion of so much cabin space to cargo holds and
acquisition of additional factory equipment for export wound up taking considerable time. In the end
the fleet got back to the colony almost a year behind its normal nine-year cycle in 2489.
The eight thousand new arrivals came through quarantine with only slight outbreaks of flake flu, no
deaths, and no controversy. The new technology brought by the fleet inspired considerably more
drama. The 2489 delivery was of nanofabrication components - the tools to make the tools which
could assemble on the smallest scales. This was not intended to be the last round of imports, but it was
expected to be the last round of major upgrades - Snowflake's manufacturing base would be capable in
theory of assembling any technology that Earth could. Duchess Football had begun negotiations with
existing industry over long-term lease terms as soon as she had a cargo manifest in hand, but as the
fleet drew closer and word spread of what it was bringing, a large faction of the populace grew angry
over what they perceived as a policy further enriching those few who had benefited most from the last
three technology imports.
Inevitably several petitions on this matter landed on the 2489 ballot (held just a month before the fleet
arrived) proposing various "fairer" methods of distributing the expected wealth. Two of them - more or
less contradictory, of course - were approved by slim margins: One would institute a lottery among
everyone below voting age giving ownership of the equipment to three thousand lucky winners. The
other would impose extremely heavy lease terms on anyone receiving the equipment, and use the
money to reduce taxes on most colonists by half. The SDS found itself split on this issue. The older
members knew that an effective democratic government would probably make the same choice that the
Duchess had made, but the youth saw it more in terms of the colony's old guard protecting its own. In
any case, Football flatly turned down the first petition. The second one was still on her desk when
things began to spin out of control.
The list of companies selected for the equipment leases was public knowledge. The terms that were
being discussed were not, but it quickly leaked that the negotiators did not expect any change. At first
the public anger was targeted at the Hierarchy but as the fleet began shuttling cargo down to the planet,
industry got attention from the demonstrators as well. Several owners were attacked when they
confronted the crowds, and then several more were deliberately tracked down and beaten after
protesters observed the chilling effect the first violence had on the lease negotiations. The last straw
came when Lady Valve, the Hierarchy's representative in the negotiations, was shot. The sniper was far
away and only managed to punch a hole in her gut - no problem for a Lady to heal up in a few hours.
The industrialists knew that they were less durable and shut down the process, at least for the moment.
The equipment would just go into storage, at least for the moment. The violence died down, though the
anger continued to simmer.
Duchess Football was plainly coming to the end of her lifespan. Her last public appearance had been
just after the 2487 ballot. The few Ladies who would discuss the matter indicated she was bedridden
and stuck in her transformed state, her magical healing factor slowly losing the battle to repair
senescent organs. Much to everyone's frustration, there was still no designated heir or even a formal
plan for what would come next. The SDS (and many others less vocal in their views) hoped that this
meant that direct rule would die with the Duchess and that the colony would revert to its former
government, but no one knew, and Football wasn't telling.
Everything seemed to be coming to a boil. Even Ladies would privately admit trepidation about the
future. But in the spring of 2490 came news that changed everything, that brought hope to nearly
everyone: the Earth Magic had finally chosen a handful of colonists.
Everyone wants to claim the new MG's for their own cause, even the SDS and the revolutionaries.
However, the old MG's get the first crack at them: The Snowflake branch of Takeuchi Memorial High
School, Tokyo-Earth's ancient academy for young Ladies, has been carved out of one of Q-City's empty
quarantine zones. It will make for a pleasant boarding school, and is conveniently just a ninety-minute
train ride from downtown Malletfall. This first year of operation it will host about seventy students,
less than ten percent of which will be actual MG's. The tradition is that who is and isn't a Lady is kept
secret - but in a populace this small, that may be optimistic.
Biology
Everything is white!
Local flora and fauna are built off the familiar amino-acid/DNA coded base, and there's a lot of familiar
territory in cell morphology, but the chemistry is shifted ever so-slightly. The most obvious macrolevel difference is that the local chlorophyll analogue appears white to human eyes. The radiation it
absorbs is in the ultraviolet band. From the human point of view, the plants are missing a couple of
amino acids and a few vitamins which we need but is generally healthy to eat. The local fauna (which
tends to be largely white, black, or brown, and never taller than the fairy pads they live among) can be
eaten in small doses, but contains several alien amino acids which can cause weird effects if consumed
heavily.
Disease transmission between the local and guest ecologies is limited - viruses simply can not be
passed between them, but a few bacteria and other unicellular microorganisms have made the hop
between hosts. The majority of documented cases are of local bacteria infesting Earth organisms, as
there's a whole planet's worth of species lining up to take its crack at the guests, while after the initial
colony fleet's arrival imports of (non-human) earth species has been extremely limited. On the whole,
disease is much less common in the Snowflake colony than on Earth, but the few local plagues have
caused major disruptions.
Alpha Centauri is three-star system, and Snowflake is the second planet of the second-brightest star.
Proxima is much far away to influence the planet at all. Alpha Centauri A (which is locally referred to
as "Alpha") is, at its nearest, about as close as Saturn is to Earth. It provides perhaps as much as four
degrees (C) of extra warming planetwide for thirty out of each seventy years. The primary impact this
has on climate is to knock back the ice caps and raise sea levels during that period. One theory for why
the planet has so few ice ages in its geological history is that the warming cycle is a repeated shock that
resets other cycles which would otherwise run their course and freeze the planet over.
Since the continents are smaller, there is less depth of landmass to allow variations in weather, and thus
the number of distinct ecologies is lower than on Earth. The most common one is a slightly wetter
analogue to Earthly grasslands. Much of the colony's population is located in and around them, since
they are well-suited for cultivation of Terran crops. Next-most common are foothill and mountain
biomes, and there are a few tundra regions next to the ice caps. With so much surface covered by water
there is little chance for desert, and the lack of megaflora means the forests which dominate so much of
Earth simply do not exist at all.
The final notable biome is a transient one - as Alpha orbits away from the Beta system and Snowflake,
the planet cools and sea levels lower by ten to fifteen meters exposing a good deal of extra landmass.
These "forty-year flood plains" do not support the larger plants of the plains and the mountains, and the
animals adapted to the pad canopy of the interior stay away.
It is thought that Snowflake experienced a mass extinction (geological signs say: worldwide tsunami,
probably impact-triggered) within the last five million years. The overall biological diversity is low,
with lots of closely-related species and genera but relatively few phyla and classes.
Flora:
Fairy pad: The main genus populating the grasslands. It looks very much like a bright white Terran
lilly pad, with a thin, somewhat woody stem between ten and fifty-five cm tall supporting a thin,
circular "pad" leaf with a radius between five and twenty cm depending on species. Individual pads of
the same species have evolved to not compete with each other for sunlight - their root systems seem to
coordinate and work to shift the stems into a startlingly regular hexagonal array that packs the leaves
efficiently close with no overlap. The colonists harvest some species' leaves for use as replacement
greens - they taste like a just-barely-sweet spinach.
Snowspear grass: In between the fairy pads, tufts of snowspear poke through. Species of these grasses
grow between thirty and seventy cm tall, and all of them feature sharp, stiff edges which help them
grow straight up and do a good job of discouraging local herbivores from consuming them. Human
skin is very easily sliced open by snowspear. The cuts are shallow and painful, like paper cuts except
often longer. Any non-shear clothing is sufficient to protect the wearer, reinforcing the preference for
full-body coverage.
Lavendark: small, flowering plant with extremely dark purple - virtually black - blossoms. This low
ground cover fills in where fairy pads have fallen or can not grow due to soil depth. They have a spicysweet scent, and insects often cluster around them, actually feeding directly on the outer layer of the
blossoms.
Snowshroom: Snowflake has its own functional equivalent of fungi. These come in extraordinary
variety, but are limited to the 10cm scale at their largest. The most common geometries are spherical
and cylindrical. There is a very dense - woody - "core" at ground level which handles special digestive
functions, with a network of "arteries" containing a muddy-looking fluid that delivers nutrients to the
growing surface. If you cut one open, it will "weep". Snowshroom meat is good eating though high in
carbohydrates, if you drain the fluid (which tastes awful and is toxic in absurdly high doses) and extract
the core (so you don't break your teeth).
Tarpturf: while the pads tend to cover plains areas, they do not do very well on sloped ground and this
competing species wins out. Tarpturf plants are effectively one very large leaf, with roots holding them
down on one edge. They always grow uphill from the root edge, which widens at about 25cm/month.
The leaf will grow up to about 120cm up the hill, flat on the ground, and widens until it hits terrain it
cannot grow through or is starved for sunlight by more tarpturf growing below it. The largest
individual found was almost 2 km wide. These plants do strange things to surface-water flow - it is not
uncommon for puddles to be trapped under the leaf, and the plant is able to use those reservoirs to
survive the occasional drought or dry season. Walking on tarpturf feels a lot like walking on stiff but
loose fabric - put enough force into it and you will slip or (if it's a young portion) tear the leaf. The
fibers in tarpturf make it wholly inedible (imagine eating hair, or yarn), but are very useful as textile
sources. Younger leaf segment fibers are delicate and silky, then grow coarser and stronger over time.
Hills and mountains covered with tarpturf appear mummified.
Monoclover: Another low ground cover which competes with lavendark. This is especially prevalent
near coastlines, and in sandy or dry soils. In a vague way they resemble the pads of the plains, with a
single round leaf centered on a stalk... except the leaf is never more than 2cm in diameter, and the stalk
length is half the leaf diameter or less. They do not flower or attract insects. This is widely considered
the most attractive option for a Snowflake-flora lawn.
Fauna:
Peripanther: Undisputed top of the food chain on the plains, the peripanther does look much like a
white version of its earthly namesake, except for the bony ridge on the crest of its skull containing a
bundle of nerves which terminates in a third eye on a slightly-prehensile stalk. The peripanther glides
underneath the fairy pads with its periscope eye skimming just above the pads, watching for
disturbances caused by prey moving underneath. They are solitary animals, but also curious - it's not
uncommon for a human walking through the plains to draw several spying eyes. They seem to be
fascinated by anything which is taller than the pad canopy, and especially with anything that uses RFbased wireless technology. There are no documented cases of peripanthers spontaneously attacking
adult humans, however they have killed young children hiding beneath the pad canopy and a few adults
who directly approached and then chased after the beasts into the canopy.
Peepmouse: Out of the same evolutionary tree as the peripanther, this rodent has three eyes as well but
most of the time only the periscope eye is visible peeking out from its puffy coat of white fur. The
largest peepmouse species are 8cm in length (not counting fur), most are half that. Coloration is
usually white, but a typical variation is to have one or two streaks of grey or brown, roughly the width
of a fairy pad stalk. These are strict herbivores (with a preference for the ground-level vegetation) and
seem to dislike Earth plants, but can survive on them if they need to. The colonists mostly consider
them to be minor pests - like the peripanther, they are attracted to RF-networking equipment, and often
the first sign that a colonist's house is infested is when she comes home to find a nest built around her
EI's base station. A few colonists keep them as pets, some farms are experimenting with using their fur,
and many devastatingly cute animated movies (on Earth) have been inspired by these lovable puffballs.
Blaine: Jokingly named for a pilot on the original expedition to Alpha Centauri, these plains herbivores
are similar to miniature giraffes with proportionally thicker limbs and neck. They're just tall enough to
reach the pad canopy without poking up through it. Most varieties of Blaines are furry and grey with
some random vertical striping in light brown. Their heads are bald and long with strong jaws which are
used to rip chunks out of fairy pads. Blaines tend to travel in family groups, three or four adults with
whatever children they've had in the last two years. Farmers dislike Blaines, since they will eat the
leaves (though not the stalks) off of anything, both Earth biology and Snowflake. The more-spindly
"mountain blaine" lives on the lower and middle slopes, feasting on tarpturf.
(happy to include player entries for both plants and animals)
important technologies:
Slam-Pr~chtaronn Interstellar Acceleration Rediscovery (SPIAR, pronounced "spear") drive:
Initially discovered by the Reds and stolen by the Whites, the original name of the starship drive has
been lost. After the Alien War, Earth had limited examples of this technology and the only ship
recovered which was built in a way which could be studied was too badly damaged by the fighting to
be useful. Tokyo-Earth had far more pressing problems in the aftermath of the war, and so the gear was
put away for more than three decades before anyone looked at it again.
Research started in earnest in 2092, as one of the dying Queen's final requests was that her successor
find a way for the Reds to go home again. The project turned out to be more complex than anyone
imagined, but in 2136 Lady Slam and one of the oldest surviving Red normals managed to decipher the
firmware in the Whites' shuttle-scale implementation of the technology. The first starship was ready to
launch for Epsilon Eridani in 2145.
The SPIAR drive uses magical-energy-tapping technology which the Hierarchy had developed in the
2030's. One of the uses of that had always been for acceleration of masses, but SPIAR added scale
(both of mass pushed and rate of acceleration) and the ability for the magic source to push herself
without requiring any reaction mass. An MG simply channels energy into the system, and it accelerates
the ship at the rate and direction set by helm control.
SPIAR is an interstellar drive, but it is not faster-than-light and passengers on a SPIAR ship are subject
to time dilation. Dilation is exploited as much as safely possible, so that the four-year slowtime
(perceived time outside a ship) journey to Alpha Centauri takes only thirteen days fasttime (perceived
time on board ship).
From the fasttime perspective, it theoretically should be possible to accelerate to, or even past, the
speed of light. Nothing actually prevents them from trying, but since the change in velocity is not
instantaneous, the trip up the time-dilation asymptote means that the ship would not be able to
decelerate within the lifespan of the universe. The people on board would not die, but what would
happen to them can not be determined. This appears to have happened to two starships over the last
350 years of using SPIAR.
Since no one wants to be permanently lost in time, navigation at near-c speeds is a very careful affair.
The official speed limit for Queen's ships is "warp 5", .99999 c, and loaded colony ships often operate
at warp 4.5. (To get a warp number, count the nines after the decimal - .999 is warp 3, .999994 is warp
5.4.) Before the Queen imposed that limit, the record was set by a ship on the routine Earth-Keid run at
warp 6.72. Warp five translates into 217 to 1 time dilation, which is plenty for all but the farthest-flung
exploration.
There is no limit on the mass which can be accelerated. The volume which the SPIAR can push
depends on the size of the drive unit. Diminishing returns make accelerating more than a sphere
roughly 600m in radius cost-prohibitive.
Magical Instantaneous Communications System (MICS):
Invented in 2410, this is exactly what it sounds like. Instantaneous magical effects had been
demonstrated in the 22nd century, but converting that into a communication system eluded magitech
researchers for almost two centuries. What was needed was a purely technological system which could
detect magical effects. Once that was discovered in 2407, the pieces fell into place and there was a
field-deployable system ready by 2412.
MICS has two distinct parts - the sending unit and the receiving unit. The sender is essentially an
interstellar-class SPIAR drive module, retuned to project a non-interactive magical field rather than
motive force. The Lady channels magic into it, and the attached computers modulate and aim the field
projected to the destination. The receiving unit is a much less-impressive piece of equipment, merely a
desk-sized sensor, but to pick up the signal field at interstellar distances it must be in a magic-free
environment. In practice, this means it must be at least 25 light-seconds away from any MG, including
the one operating the sending unit. Light-speed links from the space installations to the sending
stations are normal, so almost-realtime conversations are possible, but slow.
Bandwidth is roughly on the terabit/s scale, so there's no problem moving lots of raw information
through it, but high-density data (particularly multiple HD holo streams) is a bit more than it can handle
efficiently. A Lady is required to operate the sending station; that's a position which Earth Station is
easily able to continuously staff so the outposts get a constant stream from home, but those outposts are
themselves unlikely to have enough MG's to be sending back to Earth more than a few percent of the
time unless there's an emergency.
Holographic Projection:
The first modern-style three-dimensional projection systems date back to the 2020's when a German
corporation demonstrated the technology at an entertainment industry gathering. The technique used
involved many, many light sources, an array of finely-controllable mirrors, a supercomputer, and a
huge amount of power. The machinery required to generate a cubic meter projection field completely
filled a large room below the projection area. It was pretty as all hell, but it was not practical in most
settings. Over the next two centuries, advances in machining and construction precision reduced that
scale by an order of magnitude, cramming the projection unit into a space about fifteen times larger
than the holo field. By the mid-23rd Century the technology was beginning to reach into the consumer
marketplace, though more as a toy than a serious display mechanism.
The development of SQDRP technology by IBM in 2271 turned the conventional wisdom about what
was possible with holographic projection on its head: Instead of huge amounts of equipment for little
display volume, the new system's problem was that it was impossible to make detailed images small
enough to fit in most rooms. Individual (cubic) pixels were fuzzy, and in the first-generation
technology the smallest they could be was 12mm on a side. The projector unit was small - it was
simple to put one in a handheld device. Again, not so practical for a home display, but SQDRP was
fantastic in a stadium environment, and many professional sports teams found they could project
"away" games onto their home field.
The old-style system was termed "HQ holo", and HQ systems continued to shrink incrementally.
SQDRP was given the moniker "LQ holo", and its performance also improved. By 2490, HQ is closing
in on a 2:1 equipment-to-projection size ratio, making it a feasible option for a middle-class home (on
Earth) with a little architectural preplanning. LQ pixel scales are down to 1.6mm, though consumer
devices are usually 2mm or larger. At that size they are still too big for high-detail displays in the
home, but low-resolution, highly iconic interfaces and interactive characters are commonly used to
exploit the technology.
Holoprojector specifications are usually expressed by two numbers. First is an indication of how many
pixels on an edge it will display (cubic displays are standard) with a third-power indicator, as in
"1000^3". The second number is a measurement of pixel size. HQ displays are usually .2mm or
smaller, typical LQ displays are 2mm to 5mm. There is no space between pixels in either technology,
so figuring actual display (edge) size is as simple as multiplying the first number by the second.
Since LQ emitters are so small and relatively inexpensive, about fifty years after their invention they
were being attached to anything and everything. Simply walking down the street, a pedestrian would
have to dodge (or not-dodge, if she preferred) hundreds of images: street signs, store displays,
holographic "clothing", visual "signatures", and more, much of which was interactive. It was more
than just a fad since the height of the style lasted almost three decades, but as the density grew greater
and greater the backlash against the visual cacophony grew. Eventually, public nuisance laws were
passed to keep it all in check. In most places, stores can display a single holo image outside of their
building (it's cheaper than building a solid sign), with strong limitations on the amount of motion it
displays. Vehicles may not display any. Pedestrians may have a maximum of one holo displayed at
any time, no larger than one cubic meter, and not impeding the vision or path of any other pedestrian or
vehicle.
In the later half of the 25th century, the style is to use one's allotted "personal holo" for an avatar for
their EI. Due to their size and pixelation, these avatars tend to be non-human and/or highly iconic, but
stand on a busy corner long enough and you'll see literally everything.
EI (Emulated Intelligence):
By 2030, computing power had become cheap enough that most basic calculation and programmatic
computing tasks were trivial operations. Everyone agreed that the next step forward needed to be the
leap to artificial intelligence, but nobody could figure out how to make it work.
The one productive area of AI research had been so-called "expert systems" - tools that could look at a
set of data and analyze it with a specific intent. The limitation of expert systems is that they know
nothing outside of their focused range of analysis. Thus one expert system could monitor and control a
nuclear reactor given a full set of sensor data, one could do facial recognition, one could accurately
read polygraph information, but each was a separate program, and a human being was needed to
integrate the results of all of them.
The breakthrough came with both proliferation and layering of expert systems. If you've got four
thousand expert systems which can each do one single thing and collectively represent most of the
functions a human being can perform, then that is a set (actually several dozen sets, which then
condense into distinct meta-sets) of data which more expert systems can analyze and process according
to programmed priorities.
From a raw text description like that, it's hard to get a sense of the power of this technique. In practice,
the result was an "Emulated Intelligence". It is intelligent, by most definitions, but it is not at all selfaware, and it is not at all creative in the human sense of the word. It will act as though it is self-aware after all, it is programmed to be that way since most humans like to feel like they are talking with
another person. Creativity is harder to simulate, and the best attempts basically boil down to randomly
clumping data and spewing it out the user interface at odd moments. Most users leave that setting
turned down to zero.
EI's are very good at doing things. They are sometimes capable of planning things. They are not
particularly good at managing things involving multiple people interacting. They can not be trusted to
react capably in a situation which is entirely unique or was never considered by any of the metasystem
architects.
Computing power and storage increases leveled off by the dawn of the 22nd Century. Quantum
computing is still the holy grail, four hundred years later, something to be sought but that no one
expects to find. The advances of the last centuries have all been incremental improvements in EI
programming and construction. Computer science has become a wholly mathematical field, working
on more and more esoteric ways to squeeze an extra percent or two of performance and intelligence
from static resources.
Most people refer to their computer system(s) as their EI - the distinction between hardware and
software is mostly lost outside of the industry. The EI fills the role of personal secretary, bodyguard
(not in a physical way, but by warning of danger and automatically contacting emergency services),
nurse, librarian, and personal recordkeeper/historian. You can keep secrets from your EI, but most
people never bother to. Use of EI(s) as personal friends is a style that has come and gone over the
years - in 2490 imagining that degree of relationship is regarded as foolish, but most children and many
adults treat them as pets. The capability and scale of their LQ holoprojectors lends itself to this niche,
displaying cartoonish miniature presences following their masters around.
(Magical Girls in Spaaaaaace: )
(MG spacer culture, deep space exploration efforts)
(Snowflake population - roughly 1.4M in 2490)
Cities:
Malletfall: (colloquially known as Mallet's Folly, or sometimes just The Folly) The largest city
(170,000) and the oldest, the location originally scouted by (and named for) Mallet's original
expedition. Near the edge of Queen's Lake, the largest freshwater body on the planet (besides the
icecaps). The spaceport, a decent amount of industry, and the tourist destination (such as it is) is
located here. but despite the increasing population of the planet, Malletfall's population is slowly
shrinking. See, there's this little problem with earthquakes...
Michiko: The (new) capital city, a couple hundred klicks southeast of Malletfall, in the heart of the best
farmland on this half of the continent. Growing (pop. 89,000), but regarded as a the most boring place
on the planet.
Escalator: Further north, at the base of the upthrust mountains, a small mining base camp grew into the
third major city on the planet. Population is roughly 140,000, though that's counting the sprawling
exurban tentacles reaching up to 20km into the mountains. Raw materials, textiles, and heavy
manufacturing are the industries here. Lots of younger adults who grew up on the farm and moved up
here for jobs. The nightlife and culture at Escalator are the most vibrant on the planet - so much as
there's any artistic center, this is it.
Technology and lifestyle:
Industry is rapidly bootstrapping on Snowflake, but there's simply no way that small a population can
build all the technologies and produce all the resources that a modern society takes for granted. On the
other hand, computing power is compact (and durable) enough that it's easy to import enough to
support the entire colony.
In the cities, there is sufficient power and construction materials that daily living is roughly like firstworld Earth in the 1950s... with internet and EI's. Out in the country, industrialization has not quite
spread so far, and the tech level is more like the 1920's - large farms will have a tractor, successful
medium farms mostly do too, but anyone farming for a living will be using a lot of muscle power and
manual labor. But they'll have internet and EI's too.
The main bottlenecks in producing fully-modern equipment and appliances are in power production,
materials production, and custom electronics/computing production. The newly-arrived nanofab
equipment will solve the latter two issues over the next five years, fully-modern solar power collection
in the next ten, antimatter grid technology by 2510, and fusion stations by 2525. At that point the
colony should be able to build and support anything that Earth can - the only limitation will be its
population base will be too small to build the vast variety of things that Earth's billions can.
The standard computing device that virtually every colonist will have is a handheld device paired with
a corresponding base station. The base unit is only slightly larger - the handheld is usually capable of
doing all the same tasks, but in normal operation a lot of processing and communication will be
offloaded to the base unit to conserve power and bandwidth, and to provide backup for when the
handheld goes flying out of the user's hand and over a cliff or a peripanther makes off with it. While
the computing units are easy to transport, large screens are luxury items. Most users have three options
- the small direct-view screen on the handheld, projection onto a flat surface, or low-quality (300^3,
2.5mm) holographic projection.
Farming is the largest occupation on the planet. In the first generation, the colony's greatest struggle
was simply feeding the population, and nearly 70% of the colonists worked the land. As more
equipment was imported, and especially as locally manufactured heavy equipment, power sources, and
agrochemicals started appearing, crop yields went up and significantly less manpower was required to
feed the colony. Even today almost 40% of the adult population farms, though this number is inflated
by farming of non-food crops and by a large number of homesteaders (many of them new migrants
from Earth) who farm (for various reasons) on the edges of the settled area at lower yields.
Mining has become the next-largest occupation as the (increasingly robotic) manufacturing sector
expands and becomes ever-more-hungry for raw materials. Safety in the mines is good, though not at
all perfect, and the work is considered to be harder than on the farm (though with decidedly shorter
hours). Most mines are owned by employee consortiums, so compensation is far better than working
on someone else's farm, though not as good as owning your own farm.
Industrial jobs are growing in importance, but with much routine assembly work best done by EI's,
most of the increase is in the fields of design, engineering, and marketing. There are almost no jobs in
industry which are considered low-skill, and the expectation is that the few jobs here will be the richest
ones for the foreseeable future.
EI's displace office work.
Retail/service sectors
Scientists.
Teachers (lots and lots of kids)
Government.
Government specs
The Queen
The Duchess - essentially monarch
The Ministries
Education:
Security: SBI, Snowflake Guard (Alpha, Beta, Proxima, Sol companies, Reserves), town police
City Government
Life on Snowflake
Long term fight between Terran and Snowflake biomes.
Humans building brightly colored buildings to contrast with the white terrain.