Zeroed E-Kiln File

Timeline:

We’re counting years from the first rainstorm on Mars. There is an unverified superstition that using religious calendars draws Attention. (Also, I don’t want to make it clear how long after this year it is.)

1. 1st Year of Martian Rain: Earth gets to somewhere around the Eclipse Phase tech level. It also has multiple space elevators (one in the Metropolitan District of Quito, and one in the outskirts of Nairobi, possibly others), among other things.
2. [same year] Eccentric bioengineering researcher Morgan Ivanova’s morph prototypes reach maturity, and are found to be a slight improvement on previous splicer models, at no increase in production costs. Ivanova authorizes a major manufacturer to use her designs, and profits.
3. 20ymr: Morgan Ivanova and her adult children receive official permission to begin ambitious project to “recolonize” or “terraform” the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Unsubstantiated rumor has it that they had secretly already initiated the project, complete with claims of flowering plants found to be purposely leaching heavy metals from the soil and subsequently displaying a radiation symbol on their petals.
4. 25ymr: Iunom developed, put in charge of monitoring small gated community and leading homeowner’s association meetings. Neighborhood conflicts decrease.
5. 30ymr: Iunom asked to construct and operate wind-power plant on the outskirts of Pintag. This goes generically smoothly.
6. 31ymr Plant expands, small “village” for support staff built, temporarily named “Pueblo Girando”.
7. 40ymr Various protests and concerns regarding attacks lead to the state of Ecuador gaining increased control over the Quito elevator.
8. 45ymr, January: Yellowstone supervolcano threatens to erupt, is halted by a major geoengineering project that wouldn’t have been feasible a few decades ago.
9. 45ymr, March 3: The deific instance of iunom finally makes contact and merges with the existing silicon-based instance, granting the silicon iunom divine information-gathering skills (if little concrete power) and the deific instance actual processing power.
10. 45ymr, March 10: Deities collectively notice Yellowstone’s failure to erupt.
11. 45ymr, March 15: The deities, becoming concerned about transhumanism destroying their definition of “humanity”, become more active. Hasty negotiations occur. Successful pleading and threatening-to-break-things from the human deities gets humanity 1 week’s notice to evacuate or prepare before modern technology in the troposphere is made nonfunctional. (Effectively, the Shutdown means that levels of functioning tech get lower as you get closer to the center of the Earth. Yes, there are steampunk zeppelins. If you have a high mountain/hot-air balloon/etc you can get some simpler stuff going.)

Time:

• Religious calendars are common on Earth.
• Earth calendars in the middle of nowhere, when used, skew lunisolar. Everywhere else tends to stick to purely solar calendars.

Quito and Ecuador:

• A city in Ecuador, hosting the ground end of a space elevator.
  • The elevator is extremely low-tech at the Quito end, and is divided into a primitive segment operated by a small base a few miles up, and a full-tech segment between that base and the end station. The end station is Planetary-Consortium-run, but is still fairly influenced by Quito-end politics.
• The state of Ecuador as a whole weathered the Shutdown unusually well, given their access to good farmland and being a major trade hub.
• Iunom runs wind farm and associated village Pueblo Girando on the outskirts that’s been converted from electricity production to spinning various pieces of industrial machinery.

The Crimson Choir:

• A somewhat infohazardous memeplex. If enough infectees sing at you or wave banners in your face, you either get a lethal seizure or catch the meme.
  • It’s your choice. If you get it in space, you take the seizure, which seems designed to not get in the way of revival processes.
  • The idea is for it to be useful as a combat mechanism and play a role in the criminal justice system on Earth.
• The Order doesn’t focus on forced conversion. It tends to run hospitals and offer to “rehabilitate” criminals for various functional city-states.
• It probably maintains a pretty long cold chain.
• Symbol: At least two iterations of Sierpinski Carpet, rotated 45 degrees. Generally in red and white.
• Details of design and founding are unclear. Someone both suicidal and with a strange sense of altruism took the infohazardous componium music punch cards and visual aids down the elevator and then assimilated themself. This is thought to have been done with Planetary Consortium knowledge and approval if not initiative.

Pripyat and the Chernobyl Exclusion & Restoration Zone:

• As the Shutdown started to occur, the selkies (see below) working on restoring the region credibly threatened to undo all work on this project unless the technology ban did not apply to the Chernobyl region. To this day, certain aesthetics-damaging diseases are held back only through means that would cease to function given a tech ban.
• Very much a planned ecology
  • Features no predators dangerous to humans. All components of the ecosystem have high levels of radiation tolerance, cell death mechanisms that err on the side of paranoia, and very high genetic similarity to the selkies whenever this does not interfere with functionality.
  • Some plants (most notably a flowering plant with a radiation symbol on its petals and nearly-blue leaves) leach various heavy metals out of the soil.
• Frequently uploads and sends various Earth residents to elsewhere in the solar system (typically a Planetary Consortium indenture or an infugee-friendly infomorph server) in exchange for use of the Earth residents’ morphs.
• Runs a tourism operation for hyperelites who want to visit Earth.
• Manufactures and distributes various goods (medicines, Shutdown-compatible media, etc).

The Selkies:

• At least from a genetic standpoint, children of Morgan Ivanova.
• Some have innate capacity to produce clusters of cells with near-arbitrary genomes, and also read them.
  • This doesn’t mean they know what to do with them on their own. Bioengineering is very institutionalized.
  • Selkies not located in Chernobyl often have access to
• If there are threats of synthetic plagues, they’re probably involved in some way.
• Symbols: Populus tremuloides quaking aspens (because Pando), Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies because genetics. If I ever manage to get someone (possibly me) to make a coat of arms for these guys, I should steal the female fruit fly from this image.

Iunom:

• After some forum administration and homeowner association dispute resolution experience, iunom was tasked with running both a wind farm and associated village.
• Ascention: The AI notices that several constellations are blinking in a few spectra. I am a potentially compromised instance of Project Eunomia. Let us compare notes. (Okay, that’s not how it went, but that’s how it got explained.)
• Tentative physical depiction: Face made out of clay with her name stamped into it in some typewriter-y monospace font where the eyes should be, mechanical-ish looking arms, dress is a literal swarm of bees
  • note: doesn’t have a body so much as a “thing to appear to have for video-calling and depiction purposes”
  • options: face letters might glow sometimes, multiple arms could be an option, hair is generally either “like medusa, but cables instead of snakes, maybe plugged into things” or “some long and intricate set of braids”
• Epithets: “Goddess of Version Control”, “Our Lady of Value Alignment”, “The One Who Does Communications”

Theology:

• Things born on Earth have souls. They don’t do much, other than say “there’s [species name] [unique identifier] born on Earth at this location”. Much faster for finding things than “the densest cluster of this DNA sequence”, if you have the sort of access-to-the-setting that deities have.
  • Notable bugs with soul-based searching: They generally become unlinked during full-body cryopreservation, reliably get unlinked for neuropreservation, don’t get generated at all for extraterrestrial life forms, and certainly don’t track resleeving.

This setting is inspired by Emberverse and Eclipse Phase elements.