Voidmass The setting

Frontier, war and crime

Interstellar expansion has made the exercise of political authority considerably more complex. The Hegemonies formally control colonies, routes and infrastructure distributed across dozens of light years, but distance makes it impossible to exercise the same level of oversight everywhere. In most of inhabited space, power is exercised by whoever holds control of the infrastructure necessary for survival: stations, mining colonies, ports, communication networks and deposits are, at one and the same time, economic resources and instruments of power.

Many of the extrasolar settlements have grown up around a single economic activity: mining, refining, energy production, shipbuilding or research. Although almost all colonies require the formal presence of courts, administrative structures and one or more representatives of the competent Hegemony, daily life in practice depends on the MC that financed their foundation and that owns the reactor, the port and the life support plant.

This distance between formal authority and the concrete capacity to exercise it makes the interstellar frontier similar, in many respects, to the North American Wild West of the second half of the 1800s: the law exists, but the possibility of enforcing it often depends on the concrete presence of those who have the means to make it respected.

National and supranational armies

The Hegemonies maintain permanent armed forces charged with the defence of the core systems, of the main routes and of the infrastructure considered strategic. The military fleets comprise combat, transport and support units, flanked by ground formations, drones, HALF and augmented human personnel.

The availability of men, vehicles and resources does not, however, eliminate the problem of distance: moving soldiers, ships and materials between systems requires time, fuel and an adequate logistical network; for this reason forces are concentrated above all in the systems of greatest economic or military importance, while peripheral colonies often have only small garrisons.

Distance from the central authorities also grants local commands an autonomy far greater than that traditionally accorded to terrestrial armed forces: a commander may be compelled to take political and military decisions without being able to wait for instructions, knowing that any orders coming from the centre might arrive when the situation that generated them has already changed.

Private military forces

Most of the MCs operating in any capacity in the military sector today have ships, ground formations, drones, HALF and augmented human personnel.

In the Atlantic Directorate, Halcyon and numerous smaller companies provide protection for industrial installations and commercial routes; in the Kontinental’nyj Sojuz, formally private organizations frequently operate in close collaboration with the state apparatus; in the Meridian Pact, the bloc’s lesser centralization has produced a particularly high number of independent operators, some of whom work alternately for governments, MCs, local administrations or private clients.

The boundary between security force, private army and mercenary organization often depends solely on the contract in force at that moment: on a peripheral colony, a unit charged with protecting a mine may be the only armed force present in the entire system.

The Free Companies

The most structured independent operators are commonly known as Free Companies. They are paramilitary organizations that belong to no Hegemony and live off their own contracts.

The difference with respect to a private military company is roughly the same that, in the late Middle Ages, separated a company of adventure from the troops in the permanent service of a prince or a city: the latter belonged to the client’s military apparatus, whereas a Free Company retains its own structure, command and identity and temporarily places its forces at the service of whoever hires it.

TRIVIA: The term Free Company derives directly from the free companies of the late Middle Ages: mercenary formations independent of any single political power and hired through temporary contracts. The name came back into use during the first interstellar expansion, when the distance between systems once again made it advantageous to maintain autonomous armed forces capable of moving from one client to another.

Its members live on their own ships and share logistics, risks and often property: the longest-lived have changed commanders, absorbed defeated units and preserved the names and traditions of their founders, developing over time their own value systems, rituals, informal hierarchies and collective identities, often far stronger than the ties to the societies the individual members come from. Command structures can vary considerably: some companies adopt hierarchies similar to those of the hegemonic armies, while others function as federations of autonomous captains, who may operate in the same sector for different clients.

The Free Companies operate above all on the frontier, where a force dispatched from a hegemonic centre may take months to arrive. Their main advantage is therefore immediate availability, on which most of the services they offer are based: escort of ships and convoys, defence of colonies, suppression of revolts, recovery of wrecks, counter-piracy, the conduct of local business or campaigns on behalf of Hegemonies, MCs, administrations or other clients, and so on. The contract under which they are hired, called a condotta, establishes duration, assignments, payments and any concessions. Payment may be arranged in credits or may take the form of shares of production or stakes in infrastructure.

The main strategic assets of a Free Company are its ships, its stocks of munitions and spare parts, its Voidmass matrices, its mobile workshops and the logistical infrastructure needed to keep its units operational far from the core systems. To these are added less visible but equally important assets: up-to-date maps, route data, information on peripheral systems, local contacts, operational archives and intelligence accumulated over decades of activity. Particular value is also attributed to the Selfmark of the most experienced members, to combat Soma and to the clinics needed for reconstitution. Enlistment contracts often provide that Selfmark, bodies and part of the personal equipment remain under the company’s control until the soldier’s financial obligations have been discharged. In this sense, the capability of a Free Company does not depend only on the number of men or ships available, but on the whole set of resources that allows it to go on operating, to make good its losses and to preserve its autonomy.

For a Free Company, however, the most important asset of all is its reputation. Ships, crews and armaments can be replaced, but only as long as the company continues to be considered reliable: the punctual observance of its condotte, discretion and the ability to complete assignments are essential to guarantee access to new contracts, credit, suppliers and ports.

It is precisely the need to maintain a good reputation that distinguishes a Free Company from a band of pirates: even in the absence of condotte, a company still has crews and ships to maintain, and this necessity may drive it to carry out raids, extortion or other illicit activities. To make a habit of it, however, means compromising the very reputation on which the possibility of obtaining new assignments depends: piracy can guarantee immediate income, but for a Free Company it also carries the risk of losing the most reliable and prestigious clients.

Interstellar piracy

Because of the way an Alcubierre Drive works, a ship in warp regime is an extremely difficult target to intercept: it does not cross space along a normal ballistic trajectory, but travels inside a geometric configuration that cannot be reached or drawn alongside by conventional means. An attack therefore requires knowing in advance the planned route and, above all, the points at which the ship will be forced to drop out of warp.

The illegal availability of data relating to certified routes therefore represents a valuable resource: knowing approximate schedules, trajectories and the points at which a ship will be forced to perform a quench makes it possible to set up ambushes that would otherwise be almost impossible. More sophisticated forms of piracy involve compromising or manipulating navigation data, inducing a ship to drop out of warp in a region chosen by the attackers and far from the normal support infrastructure.

In the absence of access to navigation systems or to route data, “boarding” operations tend to concentrate at the points where traffic is forced to converge, slow down or drop out of warp: postal stations, depots, shipyards and other known infrastructure nodes. In such places it is not necessary to know the precise trajectory of a single ship, because it is enough to wait for the targets to pass along the obligatory legs; at the same time, however, these are also the points easiest to garrison permanently.

A substantial part of organized piracy derives from the Free Companies, above all from those that have irreparably compromised their reputation and lost access to condotte, credit and ports. Although excluded from the legal market, these organizations still retain ships, trained personnel, armaments, information and logistical structures, which make them particularly effective in this kind of activity.

The Space Navigation Code defines the main categories of piracy (SNC 11): illegal seizure of ships, violent boarding, kidnapping, appropriation of cargo by violence or threat, intentional attack on navigation infrastructure and systematic falsification of naval identity.

Interdiction nets

The Phase Disruption Grids (PDG), commonly called interdiction nets or fishing nets, are containment structures deployed at the gravitational margins of systems and in the vicinity of stations, capable of interrupting the warp of an incoming vector and holding it until recovery. Born as civilian installations, with the task of capturing incoming POD and offering emergency berthing to ships with a failed Quencher, in recent years they have found an increasingly extensive use in the military field as well.

The operating principle is the same in both cases: the net forces the collapse of the warp geometry and returns the vector to normal space. Civilian installations, however, operate along predetermined approach corridors, whereas a military PDG must be sized, positioned and configured to intercept a hostile ship along a predicted trajectory, thus requiring more powerful plant, more sophisticated control systems and appreciably greater planning.

In the military field the PDGs are integrated into the defence of the main approaches to colonies, shipyards and strategic installations: the nets are normally paired with sensors, weapon batteries and patrol units, so as to force an intercepted vector to re-enter normal space inside a zone already prepared for combat. In some systems, preferential approach trajectories are also created precisely in order to channel traffic through sectors covered by the nets. Control of the certified routes thus takes on a military relevance as well, because knowing the most probable paths means knowing where to concentrate interdiction, sensors and firepower.

The system nevertheless presents obvious vulnerabilities: the PDGs are expensive installations, relatively static and difficult to conceal, and are therefore easy prey for sabotage, pre-emptive attacks and infiltration operations.

Smuggling

The regulatory fragmentation between the Hegemonies has created an enormous market for prohibited goods and technologies, whose principal exchange hub is the Meridian Pact.

For almost all the more widespread patented and certified technologies there are alternative versions, developed through industrial espionage, reverse engineering, unauthorized modification or the recombination of components from different manufacturers. These systems are often able to reproduce all or part of the functions of the original, while no longer having any official relationship with the holder of the patent and therefore being unable to offer the same guarantees in terms of reliability, safety or compatibility.

Not all trade in these technologies is illegal, and a significant part of it takes place by exploiting the grey areas created by the regulatory differences between the Hegemonies. Controls concentrate above all on expressly prohibited technologies, such as unauthorized military systems, components intended to evade the registration of Soma, clandestine cell cultures, cognitive manipulation apparatus or devices designed to circumvent fundamental constraints such as the Rule of 27.

The smuggling of technologies subject to the most severe prohibitions generally takes place through networks distributed across several systems: to this end criminal organizations use apparently ordinary ships, front companies, falsified documentation, shipments split between several vectors and a series of intermediate stopovers to make it difficult to reconstruct the origin, ownership and destination of the goods. These illegal activities benefit from the absence of FTL communications, a condition that slows the exchange of information between the authorities and allows goods to change vector, jurisdiction or system before a shipment can be identified.

Clandestine Soma

Any legally produced Soma is entered in the Somatic Continuity Register together with the individuals who have occupied it. A clandestine Soma is therefore any “shell” that can be used outside its registered history: it may be a body never entered in the Register or, in the more common cases, a Soma that has been stolen, reconditioned or associated with a falsified provenance. The possibility of having a body that cannot be traced with certainty to one’s own continuity chain makes these goods particularly valuable on the black market.

Producing a complete Soma illegally is an extremely difficult operation: it requires cell lines, bioreactors, drugs, growth structures and specialized personnel, all of them costly and hard to obtain. Soma entirely lacking a history in the Register are therefore extremely rare; most of those distributed illegally come from thefts, leaks from the certified supply chains or the recovery of bodies taken from morgues, clinics, accidents and conflict zones. Around these activities a veritable “market in shells” has developed in recent years, in which bodies are reconditioned, modified or rebuilt with tissue of different provenance before being put back into circulation.

An analogous market concerns cybernetic implants: artificial limbs, sensory organs and neural interfaces can be recovered from corpses, wrecks or abandoned structures, reconditioned and reinstalled without certification. The price is far lower than that of a new implant, but the actual condition, the compatibility and the consequences for the BRI can be difficult to assess before the operation.

Consciousness theft

The most precious asset of the Soma industry is not the body but its content: a Selfmark can contain decades of memories, professional skills, confidential information, access codes and personal knowledge impossible to obtain by other means, and cognitive archives are consequently priority targets for industrial and military espionage.

The theft of a Selfmark does not necessarily allow access to the memories it contains, because imprints are normally encrypted and protected by systems that make unauthorized activation extremely difficult. The value of an intact copy nevertheless remains enormous: the executive of an MC may know proprietary architectures, the officer of a military unit may hold information on a colony’s defences, and so on.

The possibility of seizing a person’s cognitive imprint without seizing their body has also given rise to a new type of computer crime, known as cognitive ransomware: the subject goes on living normally without knowing that someone holds a copy of their Selfmark and can threaten to reconstitute it clandestinely, to duplicate it, to sell it or, if the imprint is not digitally protected, to disclose its content in order to extort money, information or other concessions.

Intentional and accidental mirroring

Mirroring represents one of the phenomena most difficult to control: an unregistered Soma and a stolen copy make it possible to circumvent much of the protection that prevents the simultaneous activation of more than one instance of the same identity.

The motives for intentional mirroring can vary: criminal organizations may duplicate a person in order to replace or impersonate them, while intelligence services may attempt to obtain an interrogable instance of a subject they are unable to arrest. There is also a private demand, fed above all by the wealthier classes, who resort clandestinely to mirroring for identity experiments, sexual practices, relationships of domination or other desires difficult to realize within the limits imposed by law. In some exclusive circles, the possibility of temporarily having several versions of oneself has itself become a form of luxury and transgression.

Not all cases are criminal in origin, however: since the local replicas of the Somatic Continuity Register are synchronized only with the arrival of couriers, it can happen that a person declared dead or missing in one system is duly reconstituted from an archived copy while, in another, they are still alive. This eventuality, known as accidental mirroring and typically discovered only at the Register’s next synchronization, is the most frequent cause of duplication and is the only case in which none of the parties involved has necessarily committed an offence.

The nature of the reconstitution does not alter the status of the subject produced: once activated, the Mirror is recognized as a person regardless of the circumstances of its origin and is not answerable for any offence committed by whoever created it. At the same time, however, it does not retain the identity, the property rights or the other legal positions of the individual from which it derives.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that, from the moment of activation, every Mirror inevitably begins to acquire a mentality of its own, distinct from that of the other instances: a subject created to obey its own original may change its mind, claim the previous continuity or conclude that the person responsible for its creation has committed a crime against it. The few but significant known cases have helped to make mirroring one of the most feared practices in the entire sector.

Beyond twenty-seven

There is a clandestine market aimed at those who intend to exceed the limits imposed by the Rule of 27 and become, in effect, a BLIGHT. The main clients are soldiers and mercenaries in search of performance incompatible with a legally compliant body, but it is also used by people suffering from incurable conditions or by individuals who regard the threshold as an arbitrary limitation of their own autonomy.

The clinics that carry out these procedures necessarily have to circumvent the security and certification systems of the equipment, falsifying the Biological Retention Index or arranging for the operation not to be officially recorded. The outcomes vary widely: some BLIGHT remain neurologically stable even far below the threshold, while others rapidly develop Somatic Discontinuity Syndrome.

Whatever the outcome of the operation, going below the threshold entails an almost permanent dependence on the same clandestine networks that made the procedure possible. From that moment on, maintenance, replacements and diagnostic checks have to be carried out outside the official circuits, in order to avoid producing records incompatible with the officially declared BRI; even a simple routine check can in fact reveal the patient’s real condition, exposing them to the legal consequences normally provided for BLIGHT.

Prohibited research

Competition between the Hegemonies has prevented international prohibitions from really putting an end to the most controversial research. Mirroring, the exceeding of the Rule of 27, the manipulation of consciousnesses and violations of the Segregation Principle continue to be the object of programmes that are clandestine, classified or simply transferred to the more permissive jurisdictions.

Each Hegemony applies the prohibitions on prohibited research according to different criteria, priorities and levels of control:

  • The European Federation maintains the most rigid system of control. Programmes involving Soma, Selfmark, deep modifications of the BRI or cognitive reconstitution are subject to independent verification, periodic audits and multi-level authorizations. The separation between civilian, military and medical research is formally very sharp, and derogations are rare and difficult to obtain.

  • The Pacific Alliance applies comparable standards, but with a greater integration between public authorities and industry. Control is particularly severe in the sectors that may damage the international reputation of groups such as Atsuki, Mirai and Nexus, for which reliability, certification and regulatory compliance make up an important part of commercial value.

  • In the Atlantic Directorate the framework is more flexible: civilian research remains subject to relatively stringent controls, but classified programmes may be withdrawn from ordinary oversight when they are declared relevant to national security. Over time this possibility has fed controversy over the real extent of the activities conducted by groups such as Helix and Halcyon inside military or paramilitary facilities.

  • In the Kontinental’nyj Sojuz control is heavily subordinate to the strategic interests of the state. The programmes run by Suzerain have for years been the object of accusations formulated by international bodies, which have reported possible cognitive experimentation, the use of BLIGHT and military applications of mirroring. The Sojuz authorities regularly reject these accusations or contest their legal competence.

  • In the Meridian Pact the level of regulation and control is far lower than in the other Hegemonies. The fragmentation of jurisdictions and the greater tolerance towards private research allow laboratories, universities, MCs and independent operators to work under less stringent constraints and to move personnel, equipment and programmes rapidly from one system to another. For this reason the Pact has also become one of the main destinations for researchers willing to operate at the margins of, or beyond the limits of, the rules in force elsewhere.

Organic AGI

Particular mention is due to the research aimed at developing so-called organic AGI, that is, artificial intelligences clandestinely installed in biological Soma in open violation of the Segregation Principle. The procedure is prohibited in all the main Hegemonies and requires circumventing at one and the same time medical checks, identification systems, registers and hardware constraints designed precisely to prevent the use of human bodies by AGI.

Interest in these research projects comes above all from the military apparatus, the intelligence services and industrial espionage: an AGI installed in a Soma can present verifiable DNA, ordinary vital parameters, fingerprints and an apparently human physiology, proving far more difficult to distinguish from a person than any artificial body. The most obvious applications concern infiltration, access to restricted infrastructure, the clandestine gathering of information and the circumvention of the systems that automatically distinguish between human beings and AGI.

There are no reliable estimates of the extent of this research and the hegemonic authorities have never publicly acknowledged the existence of confirmed cases: it is therefore not known whether an AGI has ever actually been installed in a biological Soma, nor whether experiments of this kind have ever succeeded.

Interstellar wars

The five Hegemonies normally avoid direct large-scale wars: an open interstellar conflict would require enormous quantities of men, vehicles, Voidmass and logistical capacity, while the slowness of communications would make it difficult to maintain a centralized command over fronts separated by light years. To this is added the strong economic interdependence between the various blocs: destroying ports, refineries, shipyards or navigation infrastructure can interrupt supply chains on which even formally neutral systems, or systems belonging to the aggressor itself, depend.

Corporate interests

The MCs complicate the picture further: Halcyon, Eidolon, Suzerain, Yang, Vahana and the other large groups own plant, shareholdings, suppliers and customers distributed among systems belonging to competing Hegemonies; a war would therefore risk damaging parties that supply vehicles, technologies or capital to both contenders. Industrial interests often cut across political borders and help to limit their rigidity.

Peripheral conflicts

Military competition therefore concentrates above all on the periphery: mining disputes, changes of government in the colonies, industrial sabotage, blockades of routes, clandestine operations and clashes between private forces allow the Hegemonies to exert pressure in strategic systems and on key planets, while at the same time avoiding the risks of a total war.

The Free Companies are particularly suited to this kind of conflict, because they make it possible to employ forces already present on the frontier without directly mobilizing the hegemonic military apparatus and, above all, they keep the client at a political and legal distance sufficient to make it more difficult to attribute responsibility for the intervention to them.

Disputes over relics

The Thanant Relics have added a further source of tension on the frontier. The discovery of a new structure can rapidly turn a marginal system into a strategic objective, attracting the interest of Hegemonies, MCs, universities and private operators and generating disputes over ownership, jurisdiction and right of access.

Private recovery teams, clandestine expeditions and groups indirectly financed by the MCs often try to reach the sites before the concessions are assigned or the authorities manage to take control of them, taking advantage of the difficulty of imposing effective quarantines on the frontier. The simultaneous presence of several groups interested in the same relic can also generate conflicts for local predominance, with occupations, sabotage, blockades of access and clashes between private forces.

The value attributed to these systems nevertheless remains largely potential, since to date there is no way of exploiting these installations adequately. Their presence may indeed impose quarantines, restrict access to vast regions, interrupt extraction activities or considerably increase the risks connected with transit and with the construction of new infrastructure in their vicinity; in the case of active ruins, entire areas can be effectively unusable.

The frontier

Despite the numerous sources of conflict, war concerns only a minimal part of human space: most colonies live for years without knowing combat, occupations or revolts, and even on the frontier normality consists above all of extraction work, commercial traffic and the maintenance of infrastructure. What distinguishes these systems from the more developed centres is therefore not a permanent condition of violence, but the greater fragility of the structures that guarantee security, supplies and the exercise of authority.

Interstellar expansion, far from reducing the inequalities between centre and periphery, has extended them on an astronomical scale, often concentrating control of labour, of infrastructure and of resources in the hands of the very parties on whom the survival of the frontier communities depends.