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Description
====
Intro
====

Van de Kamp’s World is named after the famous astronomer, Peter van de Kamp. It is a tidally-locked super-earth orbiting Barnard’s Star, a red dwarf located six lightyears from Earth. It is the second planet from Barnard’s Star. Along with Alpha Centauri, Barnard’s Star was one of the first exosystems to receive large-scale colonization.

“VdK” has a large whitish moon, Engelina (named after the aforementioned astronomer’s mother) and a much smaller irregular moon, Lubbertus (named after Peter VdK’s father). Both are on polar orbits around the planet’s terminator line. Despite being twice the size of Earth, VdK’s surface gravity is only 0.5g’s higher than Earth’s, owing to the planet’s composition being less dense than that of Earth.

Brief refresher on tidally-locked planets. VdK rotates very slowly on its axis, taking just as long to rotate around its own axis as it does to revolve around its star. One side (“Dayside”) is perpetually facing Barnard’s Star, while the other perpetually faces away from it (“Nightside”). The Nightside is dominated by dry and cold wastelands, which get icier and chillier the further away from the equator one gets, culminating in VdK’s vast Nightside ice cap. On the opposite side of the planet, the climate is also quite dry, but also very hot because of the constant exposure to the sun. In between, we have the “Twilight Belt”, which has a mostly temperate-subtropical climate which allows for the widespread presence of liquid water. The Nightside is shrouded in perpetual darkness, the Dayside in endless day, and the Twilight Belt, you guessed it, is trapped in a never-ending combination of sunrise (on the “day shore”) and sunset (on the “night shore”).

Thanks to a relatively thick atmosphere (about 3.5 bars at sea level) transferring heat from the Dayside to the Nightside, the temperature difference between the two halfs is relatively small for a tidally-locked world. Average temperature at the center of the Dayside Desert is 167F, average temperature in the Twilight Belt is 68F, and the average temperature at the extreme pole of the Nightside Desert is -40F. And like many tidally-locked planets, Van de Kamp’s World has a ring-shaped ocean stretching along the Twilight Belt between the Dayside and Nightside, known locally as “The Scar.”

Despite being within the habitable zone of Barnard’s Star, having perfectly amenable temperatures and liquid water at the Twilight Belt, and having so many other things going for it, VdK’s atmosphere is composed of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, neon, argon, *hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen sulfide* - an extremely toxic mix for humans. In spite of these conditions, however, a primitive ET ecosystem was able to form on VdK around 500 million years ago. Initially emerging in the toxic waters of the Scar (where the most complex of lifeforms are still found), before slowly colonizing the surface in the form of organisms very similar to Earth plants.

The similarities between Terran plants and Vandian plants is actually rather astonishing, given the unusual environment in which they live. Plants in the Twilight Belt are tall, spiky things and come in various shades of purple, brown and teal. Their dark coloration allows them to absorb the mostly-red wavelengths of light emitted by Barnard’s Star, while their height helps compensate for most of the star’s light being obscured by the horizon and the curvature of the planet. Closer to the nightside, the colors gradually turn to deep purple, dark brown and black, and the plants get taller and taller in order to harvest ever-dwindling levels of sunlight. Meanwhile, closer to the Dayside, the colors get lighter, turning into shades of violet-red and pink. And on the Dayside proper, the plants come various tones of white, due to the hyper-abundance of unending sunlight in these regions.

The source of the striking coloration of the water on VdK is apparently very heavy contamination of elements unique to VdK, though among them is bromide. Also, the sky above the Twilight Belt is a persistent sunset-red, which is reflected by the ocean.

The presence of ET life meant that VdK was off-limits to terraforming, but as the only planet in Barnard’s small habitable zone, writing it off was also not an option in the early days of the system’s colonization, and so it was settled anyway, despite the toxic conditions.

The first settlement on VdK was Armadaide, established in 2102 by the Irwin Colonization Society, in the region today known as “the Blood Coast”. The first settlers on VdK were 1,600,000 individuals mostly of Australian extract, though with decent numbers of New Zealanders, Brazilians, Alaskans, Californians, Floridians, and various Selenite and Exonesian ethnic groups as well. They arrived aboard the ISV New Holland, built by Serrano Interstellar on Luna and launched towards Barnard’s Star in 2089. Living on VdK was simultaneously easy and extremely difficult. Gravity, temperature and pressure weren’t concerns, but everything else was. Within this first generation, some of the colonists were already coming up with the extreme, but necessary, solutions to VdK’s long-term habitability issues.

While VdK’s biosphere was quite primitive compared to Earth’s own, it *did* possess highly-mutagenic bacteria and viruses, which appeared to play a role in the movement of animal life from the Scar onto the land. Harnessing these and other organisms, scientists on VdK came up with a revolutionary idea: instead of terraforming VdK into the image of Earth and displace its ecosystem with Terran life, why not merge the two worlds together?

The first experiments were with plants. The bioengineered “vandeflora” were distributed across the planet in select areas. While some considered engineering the plants to change the VdK’s atmosphere over time to suit human desires, this was rejected and steps were taken to, if anything, improve conditions for the burgeoning Vandian biosphere so that in the long run, VdK’s indigenous life forms would be able to flourish and radiate at an accelerated pace, effectively jumpstarting the evolution of life on Van de Kamp’s World. Indeed, when humans first arrived on VdK, there was not as much vegetation as what you see on this map, but the spread of plants on this world has expanded dramatically after a mere two centuries of colonization. By contrast to terraforming, this technique is known as “xenoforming” and while Van de Kamp’s World was one of the first exoplanets to use this method, it would not be the last.

But vegetation was only the beginning.

Some colonists had already experienced close encounters with the more sinister denizens of VdK, usually when wading in its crimson waters. String-like parasites crawling into calves through tiny tears in pant legs, microbes seeping into exposed skin, etc. Very often these encounters resulted in extensive surgeries or even amputations. In the most extreme cases, the brain would be evacuated from the rest of the body while it was still not yet infected, and then placed into a new, prosthetic body...whilst the old organic body slid into the incinerator.

However, others came out of these close encounters not only alive, but actually kinda better off. *Kinda*. Individuals with certain parasites living in their gastro-intestinal systems were able to digest some of the plants on VdK, by having the parasites eat the things for them and secrete chemicals useful to the human body, but which the parasite’s body regarded as “waste”...this was pretty cool, even if chronic internal bleeding was a side-effect. Retroviral infections on VdK usually ended in a cancer diagnosis, but some changes made to the body were expressed in that person’s children, like an ability to naturally filter toxins from the water, for example...also, *crippling brain disabilities*.

Prior to VdK, the idea of alien infections was regarded as the stuff of bad science-fiction. Life had been found on Mars, Europa, Titan and Ceres, and the assumption held true on these worlds that life with completely different evolutionary backgrounds would not have an effect on the human body due to biochemical barriers (Europa being a mild exception, since the critters found there turned out to be edible). Well, mother nature has a habit of popping our collective bubble every now and again. And these horror stories *did* lead some labcoats on VdK to the conclusion that the way to ensure a permanent human presence on the planet was to have the colonists become one with the planet: to become alien-human hybrids.

The effects of having alien parasites purposefully injected into you, and having alien viruses and bacteria swimming inside of your cells...was about as pleasant as it sounds. Many developed long-term health problems. Terminal health problems. Then the labcoats remembered that the New Holland had around ten million surplus human embryos in its cargo bay. These embryos were genetically augmented to an extreme degree, merged with alien symbiotes, implanted into artificial wombs, and then these mutant newborns were adopted by baseline human parents. The first “lazurs” were born in 2123.

On the outside, lazurs (Homo vandekampi) look strange, but are not *too* alien when one considers a humanity well-worn from aesthetic biomodding.

Hairless skin in various shades of cyan; hair in shades from red to pink; large blue-indigo eyes; dark blue tongues and internal tissues; violet-red blood; goat-like ears. On the inside, however, there are alien viruses and bacteria inside of every cell, tissue, hair, bone and fluid in their bodies, and their organs are packed with symbiotic organisms both simple and complex, and all of which are passed from mother to child. The plethora of multicellular symbiotes were not present in the first generation, however. First-generation lazurs had to endure painful xenotransplantation procedures throughout their childhood, but now these organisms are the norm inside every lazur alive today, passing from mother to child in the womb along with the unicellular symbiotes.

Lazurs are able to breathe the toxic cyanide-laced air and drink the toxic red water of Van de Kamp’s World. They breathe primarily through their lungs, but are also able to extract O2 from environmental CO2, absorbing it through their skin via symbiotic bacteria in their sky-blue epidermis. And their sensitive eyes are well-suited to the dim lighting of the permanent dusk and dawn of the Twilight Belt. Lazurs can still breathe Earthlike atmospheres, but because Earth air is thinner than the air on VdK, they have to exert more energy to breathe it, so they have to wear special masks while in the pressurized domes still present on VdK, to mechanically help pump air into their lungs.

For the first few generations, you had baseline human parents in breathing gear, walking outside holding the blue hands of their mutant children. As of 2285, 57% of VdK’s population of around 560 million people are lazurs. A smaller population of unmodified baseline humans still live on VdK with respirators (28%) and the rest of the human population is comprised of somatic cyborgs (10%), many of whom were those guys and gals I mentioned earlier who were unlucky enough to get their bodies royally fucked by the local biosphere, and are still around and kicking almost two centuries later. Baseline human immigrants and visitors have nothing to fear from these nasties, BTW. After two centuries on the planet, the colonists have come up with very reliable ways of countering these perils, with a 99% rate of success. Which is still a 1% rate of you getting horribly maimed, but still. 4.5% of VdK’s population are turingrade AI’s, and the remaining 0.5% is comprised of various smaller clades, mostly folks from other worlds in the Barnard system who come looking for opportunities, or a change in scenery.

Most of VdK’s population is still highly urbanized. The bulk of the population lives in the Blood Coast Metropolitan Area, though other conurbations have begun to grow in recent years.

The settlements of Balwurra were established for solar power collection in the perpetually-sunlit wastes of Dayside, and are inhabited chiefly by baseline humans and a quadrupedal, crab-like turingrade race called “kinglers”, who originally hail from the Halo megastructure in orbit above Mars.

Meanwhile, dome-cities in the perpetually benighted tundra of Nightside were originally established as penal colonies to extract titanium and diamonds from the area. Most of the locals are lazurs, cyborgs and baseline humans deported there from the Twilight Belt, and the guards are all androids and gynoids, who have since built their own cities and civilian economies and cultures. The androids, I mean, not the convicts. Well, also the convicts.

Tortuga is the pretentious dudebro of the Vandian colonies, being of a decidedly libertarian bent, and known for sheltering fugitives and occasionally active criminals from other colonies. If you want pet humans, you can buy them here; there’re death-parlors on every street corner, and everyone’s packing heat, because dueling is the preferred means of settling disputes.

New Sydney was originally established as an Australian cyber-socialist utopia. Here everyone is wired into a common cloudmind-type hive network. This network, facilitated by brain implants, is called the Dreamtime, and serves as a medium by which every citizen contributes a piece of themselves and their brain’s computational power to the mosaic-brain, Altjira - a composite intelligence which serves as the governor of the colony. All resources are allocated equally, and all decisions are made at the grassroots democratic level.

BAETRA is similar in some minor ways to New Sydney, but very different in much more relevant ways. It has a turingrade pop idol named KAYA as its monarch. Originally “born” in Brazil, she only gained a popular following in the megacities of southeastern Australia, where she starred prolifically in music videos, films, games, virspace realms and other forms of media produced in Australia, becoming a citizen in 2096. To make a long and very strange story very short, after Australia lost World War 5, many felt disillusioned. And KAYA became an unlikely populist leader and led her “nation” of fans, BAETRA, on an interstellar mission to establish a better society in the wilds of Van de Kamp’s World. KAYA, in her capacity as the “Millenium Princess”, is a fairly powerful monarch, but her *fabulous* Congress does most of the day-to-day grunt work that she lacks the processing to do herself. She remains very popular in the hearts and minds of the citizens of her nation, long after most of them stopped being, strictly-speaking, “human”.

Neuluna was settled predominantly by settlers of German descent hailing from the Lunar megacity of Artemis. Groter-Protea was settled by natives of Overbeek Delta, one of the six rotating habitats of the Overbeek Federation in orbit above the Earth (an Afrikaner-majority Exonesian polity established in the aftermath of the South African Civil War in the late 1990’s). Scarsriden was founded by people mostly of Alaskan and Floridian descent and has tinges of Aleut and Cuban culture here and there. Los Ursos has a predominantly Californian heritage. San Salazar has a high concentration of Afro-Brazilians. And Tuhingamua was settled mostly by Indo-Maori. But despite all of these varied ethnicities and cultures, most people on Van de Kamp’s World aren’t white, black, brown, red or yellow. They’re turquoise and teal.

Outside of these major urban clusters, the vast and largely-unexplored wilderness of Van de Kamp’s World remains very sparsely populated. More and more people are starting to leave the sprawling megacities for virgin territory outside the confines of the domed megalopoli. Some are families wanting to homestead and get some fresh, cyanide-laced air. Others are fugitives from the law, who sometimes prey upon these fine folks. Speaking of monsters, some perhaps-ill-advised xenoforming experiments with insects and other simple Earth animals have led to...missteps. Missteps like mutant centipedes, scorpion-flies and bulldog ants. Really bad ideas, but at least they stay out of the cities (usually), and in any case, it just makes VdK’s Aussie majority feel more at home. In many areas of the Vandian wilderness, it’s unwise to NOT carry a loaded gun.

The planet’s multiple governments and polities are overseen by the Irwin Congress, which is like a much more close-knit version of the UN, and is overseen by UniGov’s Barnardian branch. Besides the polities on the surface, other members of the Congress include the multiple colonies on VdK’s moons, Engelina and Lubbertus, as well as the rotating habitats in orbit above VdK and at its L4 and L5 points. Armadaide, unsurprisingly, is the seat of the Irwin Congress.

Description
====
Intro
====

Van de Kamp’s World is named after the famous astronomer, Peter van de Kamp. It is a tidally-locked super-earth orbiting Barnard’s Star, a red dwarf located six lightyears from Earth. It is the second planet from Barnard’s Star. Along with Alpha Centauri, Barnard’s Star was one of the first exosystems to receive large-scale colonization.

“VdK” has a large whitish moon, Engelina (named after the aforementioned astronomer’s mother) and a much smaller irregular moon, Lubbertus (named after Peter VdK’s father). Both are on polar orbits around the planet’s terminator line. Despite being twice the size of Earth, VdK’s surface gravity is only 0.5g’s higher than Earth’s, owing to the planet’s composition being less dense than that of Earth.

Brief refresher on tidally-locked planets. VdK rotates very slowly on its axis, taking just as long to rotate around its own axis as it does to revolve around its star. One side (“Dayside”) is perpetually facing Barnard’s Star, while the other perpetually faces away from it (“Nightside”). The Nightside is dominated by dry and cold wastelands, which get icier and chillier the further away from the equator one gets, culminating in VdK’s vast Nightside ice cap. On the opposite side of the planet, the climate is also quite dry, but also very hot because of the constant exposure to the sun. In between, we have the “Twilight Belt”, which has a mostly temperate-subtropical climate which allows for the widespread presence of liquid water. The Nightside is shrouded in perpetual darkness, the Dayside in endless day, and the Twilight Belt, you guessed it, is trapped in a never-ending combination of sunrise (on the “day shore”) and sunset (on the “night shore”).

Thanks to a relatively thick atmosphere (about 3.5 bars at sea level) transferring heat from the Dayside to the Nightside, the temperature difference between the two halfs is relatively small for a tidally-locked world. Average temperature at the center of the Dayside Desert is 167F, average temperature in the Twilight Belt is 68F, and the average temperature at the extreme pole of the Nightside Desert is -40F. And like many tidally-locked planets, Van de Kamp’s World has a ring-shaped ocean stretching along the Twilight Belt between the Dayside and Nightside, known locally as “The Scar.”

Despite being within the habitable zone of Barnard’s Star, having perfectly amenable temperatures and liquid water at the Twilight Belt, and having so many other things going for it, VdK’s atmosphere is composed of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, neon, argon, *hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen sulfide* - an extremely toxic mix for humans. In spite of these conditions, however, a primitive ET ecosystem was able to form on VdK around 500 million years ago. Initially emerging in the toxic waters of the Scar (where the most complex of lifeforms are still found), before slowly colonizing the surface in the form of organisms very similar to Earth plants.

The similarities between Terran plants and Vandian plants is actually rather astonishing, given the unusual environment in which they live. Plants in the Twilight Belt are tall, spiky things and come in various shades of purple, brown and teal. Their dark coloration allows them to absorb the mostly-red wavelengths of light emitted by Barnard’s Star, while their height helps compensate for most of the star’s light being obscured by the horizon and the curvature of the planet. Closer to the nightside, the colors gradually turn to deep purple, dark brown and black, and the plants get taller and taller in order to harvest ever-dwindling levels of sunlight. Meanwhile, closer to the Dayside, the colors get lighter, turning into shades of violet-red and pink. And on the Dayside proper, the plants come various tones of white, due to the hyper-abundance of unending sunlight in these regions.

The source of the striking coloration of the water on VdK is apparently very heavy contamination of elements unique to VdK, though among them is bromide. Also, the sky above the Twilight Belt is a persistent sunset-red, which is reflected by the ocean.

The presence of ET life meant that VdK was off-limits to terraforming, but as the only planet in Barnard’s small habitable zone, writing it off was also not an option in the early days of the system’s colonization, and so it was settled anyway, despite the toxic conditions.

The first settlement on VdK was Armadaide, established in 2102 by the Irwin Colonization Society, in the region today known as “the Blood Coast”. The first settlers on VdK were 1,600,000 individuals mostly of Australian extract, though with decent numbers of New Zealanders, Brazilians, Alaskans, Californians, Floridians, and various Selenite and Exonesian ethnic groups as well. They arrived aboard the ISV New Holland, built by Serrano Interstellar on Luna and launched towards Barnard’s Star in 2089. Living on VdK was simultaneously easy and extremely difficult. Gravity, temperature and pressure weren’t concerns, but everything else was. Within this first generation, some of the colonists were already coming up with the extreme, but necessary, solutions to VdK’s long-term habitability issues.

While VdK’s biosphere was quite primitive compared to Earth’s own, it *did* possess highly-mutagenic bacteria and viruses, which appeared to play a role in the movement of animal life from the Scar onto the land. Harnessing these and other organisms, scientists on VdK came up with a revolutionary idea: instead of terraforming VdK into the image of Earth and displace its ecosystem with Terran life, why not merge the two worlds together?

The first experiments were with plants. The bioengineered “vandeflora” were distributed across the planet in select areas. While some considered engineering the plants to change the VdK’s atmosphere over time to suit human desires, this was rejected and steps were taken to, if anything, improve conditions for the burgeoning Vandian biosphere so that in the long run, VdK’s indigenous life forms would be able to flourish and radiate at an accelerated pace, effectively jumpstarting the evolution of life on Van de Kamp’s World. Indeed, when humans first arrived on VdK, there was not as much vegetation as what you see on this map, but the spread of plants on this world has expanded dramatically after a mere two centuries of colonization. By contrast to terraforming, this technique is known as “xenoforming” and while Van de Kamp’s World was one of the first exoplanets to use this method, it would not be the last.

But vegetation was only the beginning.

Some colonists had already experienced close encounters with the more sinister denizens of VdK, usually when wading in its crimson waters. String-like parasites crawling into calves through tiny tears in pant legs, microbes seeping into exposed skin, etc. Very often these encounters resulted in extensive surgeries or even amputations. In the most extreme cases, the brain would be evacuated from the rest of the body while it was still not yet infected, and then placed into a new, prosthetic body...whilst the old organic body slid into the incinerator.

However, others came out of these close encounters not only alive, but actually kinda better off. *Kinda*. Individuals with certain parasites living in their gastro-intestinal systems were able to digest some of the plants on VdK, by having the parasites eat the things for them and secrete chemicals useful to the human body, but which the parasite’s body regarded as “waste”...this was pretty cool, even if chronic internal bleeding was a side-effect. Retroviral infections on VdK usually ended in a cancer diagnosis, but some changes made to the body were expressed in that person’s children, like an ability to naturally filter toxins from the water, for example...also, *crippling brain disabilities*.

Prior to VdK, the idea of alien infections was regarded as the stuff of bad science-fiction. Life had been found on Mars, Europa, Titan and Ceres, and the assumption held true on these worlds that life with completely different evolutionary backgrounds would not have an effect on the human body due to biochemical barriers (Europa being a mild exception, since the critters found there turned out to be edible). Well, mother nature has a habit of popping our collective bubble every now and again. And these horror stories *did* lead some labcoats on VdK to the conclusion that the way to ensure a permanent human presence on the planet was to have the colonists become one with the planet: to become alien-human hybrids.

The effects of having alien parasites purposefully injected into you, and having alien viruses and bacteria swimming inside of your cells...was about as pleasant as it sounds. Many developed long-term health problems. Terminal health problems. Then the labcoats remembered that the New Holland had around ten million surplus human embryos in its cargo bay. These embryos were genetically augmented to an extreme degree, merged with alien symbiotes, implanted into artificial wombs, and then these mutant newborns were adopted by baseline human parents. The first “lazurs” were born in 2123.

On the outside, lazurs (Homo vandekampi) look strange, but are not *too* alien when one considers a humanity well-worn from aesthetic biomodding.

Hairless skin in various shades of cyan; hair in shades from red to pink; large blue-indigo eyes; dark blue tongues and internal tissues; violet-red blood; goat-like ears. On the inside, however, there are alien viruses and bacteria inside of every cell, tissue, hair, bone and fluid in their bodies, and their organs are packed with symbiotic organisms both simple and complex, and all of which are passed from mother to child. The plethora of multicellular symbiotes were not present in the first generation, however. First-generation lazurs had to endure painful xenotransplantation procedures throughout their childhood, but now these organisms are the norm inside every lazur alive today, passing from mother to child in the womb along with the unicellular symbiotes.

Lazurs are able to breathe the toxic cyanide-laced air and drink the toxic red water of Van de Kamp’s World. They breathe primarily through their lungs, but are also able to extract O2 from environmental CO2, absorbing it through their skin via symbiotic bacteria in their sky-blue epidermis. And their sensitive eyes are well-suited to the dim lighting of the permanent dusk and dawn of the Twilight Belt. Lazurs can still breathe Earthlike atmospheres, but because Earth air is thinner than the air on VdK, they have to exert more energy to breathe it, so they have to wear special masks while in the pressurized domes still present on VdK, to mechanically help pump air into their lungs.

For the first few generations, you had baseline human parents in breathing gear, walking outside holding the blue hands of their mutant children. As of 2285, 57% of VdK’s population of around 560 million people are lazurs. A smaller population of unmodified baseline humans still live on VdK with respirators (28%) and the rest of the human population is comprised of somatic cyborgs (10%), many of whom were those guys and gals I mentioned earlier who were unlucky enough to get their bodies royally fucked by the local biosphere, and are still around and kicking almost two centuries later. Baseline human immigrants and visitors have nothing to fear from these nasties, BTW. After two centuries on the planet, the colonists have come up with very reliable ways of countering these perils, with a 99% rate of success. Which is still a 1% rate of you getting horribly maimed, but still. 4.5% of VdK’s population are turingrade AI’s, and the remaining 0.5% is comprised of various smaller clades, mostly folks from other worlds in the Barnard system who come looking for opportunities, or a change in scenery.

Most of VdK’s population is still highly urbanized. The bulk of the population lives in the Blood Coast Metropolitan Area, though other conurbations have begun to grow in recent years.

The settlements of Balwurra were established for solar power collection in the perpetually-sunlit wastes of Dayside, and are inhabited chiefly by baseline humans and a quadrupedal, crab-like turingrade race called “kinglers”, who originally hail from the Halo megastructure in orbit above Mars.

Meanwhile, dome-cities in the perpetually benighted tundra of Nightside were originally established as penal colonies to extract titanium and diamonds from the area. Most of the locals are lazurs, cyborgs and baseline humans deported there from the Twilight Belt, and the guards are all androids and gynoids, who have since built their own cities and civilian economies and cultures. The androids, I mean, not the convicts. Well, also the convicts.

Tortuga is the pretentious dudebro of the Vandian colonies, being of a decidedly libertarian bent, and known for sheltering fugitives and occasionally active criminals from other colonies. If you want pet humans, you can buy them here; there’re death-parlors on every street corner, and everyone’s packing heat, because dueling is the preferred means of settling disputes.

New Sydney was originally established as an Australian cyber-socialist utopia. Here everyone is wired into a common cloudmind-type hive network. This network, facilitated by brain implants, is called the Dreamtime, and serves as a medium by which every citizen contributes a piece of themselves and their brain’s computational power to the mosaic-brain, Altjira - a composite intelligence which serves as the governor of the colony. All resources are allocated equally, and all decisions are made at the grassroots democratic level.

BAETRA is similar in some minor ways to New Sydney, but very different in much more relevant ways. It has a turingrade pop idol named KAYA as its monarch. Originally “born” in Brazil, she only gained a popular following in the megacities of southeastern Australia, where she starred prolifically in music videos, films, games, virspace realms and other forms of media produced in Australia, becoming a citizen in 2096. To make a long and very strange story very short, after Australia lost World War 5, many felt disillusioned. And KAYA became an unlikely populist leader and led her “nation” of fans, BAETRA, on an interstellar mission to establish a better society in the wilds of Van de Kamp’s World. KAYA, in her capacity as the “Millenium Princess”, is a fairly powerful monarch, but her *fabulous* Congress does most of the day-to-day grunt work that she lacks the processing to do herself. She remains very popular in the hearts and minds of the citizens of her nation, long after most of them stopped being, strictly-speaking, “human”.

Neuluna was settled predominantly by settlers of German descent hailing from the Lunar megacity of Artemis. Groter-Protea was settled by natives of Overbeek Delta, one of the six rotating habitats of the Overbeek Federation in orbit above the Earth (an Afrikaner-majority Exonesian polity established in the aftermath of the South African Civil War in the late 1990’s). Scarsriden was founded by people mostly of Alaskan and Floridian descent and has tinges of Aleut and Cuban culture here and there. Los Ursos has a predominantly Californian heritage. San Salazar has a high concentration of Afro-Brazilians. And Tuhingamua was settled mostly by Indo-Maori. But despite all of these varied ethnicities and cultures, most people on Van de Kamp’s World aren’t white, black, brown, red or yellow. They’re turquoise and teal.

Outside of these major urban clusters, the vast and largely-unexplored wilderness of Van de Kamp’s World remains very sparsely populated. More and more people are starting to leave the sprawling megacities for virgin territory outside the confines of the domed megalopoli. Some are families wanting to homestead and get some fresh, cyanide-laced air. Others are fugitives from the law, who sometimes prey upon these fine folks. Speaking of monsters, some perhaps-ill-advised xenoforming experiments with insects and other simple Earth animals have led to...missteps. Missteps like mutant centipedes, scorpion-flies and bulldog ants. Really bad ideas, but at least they stay out of the cities (usually), and in any case, it just makes VdK’s Aussie majority feel more at home. In many areas of the Vandian wilderness, it’s unwise to NOT carry a loaded gun.

The planet’s multiple governments and polities are overseen by the Irwin Congress, which is like a much more close-knit version of the UN, and is overseen by UniGov’s Barnardian branch. Besides the polities on the surface, other members of the Congress include the multiple colonies on VdK’s moons, Engelina and Lubbertus, as well as the rotating habitats in orbit above VdK and at its L4 and L5 points. Armadaide, unsurprisingly, is the seat of the Irwin Congress.