- 15th of March, 0 BBT
- Confluence of Empires, Terragen Space
- United Polities of Rheldann
- Khulvreijna Star System
The Rheldann Banks Orbital, seen from a distance.
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Khulvreijna was a highly metallic G0V yellow dwarf, originally surrounded by a relatively small planetary system. The system was colonized in the 6200s BBT by the Terragen Class-3 HyperAI Dream With Me as part of the Coempireal Expansion, who wished to create a new center of urbanized civilization by building a Banks Orbital. Now, in the modern day this might not seem so impressive: after all, such structures are relatively common throughout the Confluence. However, back in those days, solid megastructures of that size could be counted on the hand of a baseline human. Therefore Dream With Me’s endeavor was considerable, but thanks to appropriate system selection and careful planning, the HyperAI facilitated the task considerably.
Arriving in the system on its retooled relativistic MoonBrain after some decades of interstellar travel, the Angel began to seed the system’s asteroid belts and inner metallic planets with self-replicating neumann probes, designed to automatically build a toroidal dyson swarm around Khulvreijna, with little oversight from Dream. At the same time in orbit of Erosthat, the system’s main gas giant, the HyperAI struck one of its major moons with multiple carefully placed relativistic rods made out of magmatter and diamondoid: these objects hit the small moon with such strength and precision that its mass collapsed in onto itself, turning into an artificial black hole.
Using force manipulation technology multiple anti-gravity funnels were created in the gas giant’s atmosphere that, intersecting with the black hole’s orbit in a curve, would lift up the gases and create a highly-energetic accretion disk around the singularity: through oversight from Dream and a couple of specialized magmatter devices, a Monosynthetic Forge was born. Thanks to the extremely energetic environment of the small accretion disk, artificial nucleosynthesis could take place, thus converting part of the gas giant’s hydrogen and helium into heavier elements useful for manufacture and construction, while the rest slowly fell into the black hole in decaying orbits, growing its mass and increasing the energy of its disk.
Additionally, a belt of Conversion Furnaces was built in orbit around the planet, which fed both on the materials extracted from the planet and those synthesized by the Forge: hydrogen and helium were used as fuel for the Furnaces, while part of the elements with an atomic mass equal to or greater than iron were fed inside the main reactor chamber of the furnaces and converted into magmatter through a two-stage process consisting of monopole catalyzed fusion followed by beam core inversion. Materials with masses between helium and iron were instead collected separately, and put together with those produced by the Forge.
The manufactured magmatter was sent in direct orbit of the star, at around 1.3 Astronomical Units, where swarms of specialized drones and projected gravity fields gradually assembled it into the shape of a gridded ring five million kilometers in diameter and 4000 in width: this would act as the Banks Orbital’s support structure, as regular matter would not be able to withstand the rotational energy needed for a day/night cycle and appropriate gravity on the inner surface without using very powerful energy fields on the whole structure. While possible even six millennia ago, said structural fields would have required a considerable portion of the energy collected by Khulvreijna’s dyson swarm, which Dream wanted to allocate to other projects, and would have gone against the Angel’s desire to create a passively stable megastructure.
All the matter that wasn’t used in the Conversion Furnaces was instead directed to industrial nanofabricators in orbit of the magmatter support ring, where they were reassembled into construction materials and structural modules. In the same way as the support structure, these materials were used to build the actual Orbital: in just some decades, the magmatter mesh was covered by vast plates of diamondoid and other alloys, on the inner surface of which geographic features of all shapes and sizes rose out of glittering banks of self-replicating utility fog. Next, vast quantities of water filled out oceans, lakes and rivers, while a breathable atmosphere was introduced, a reproduction of Old Earth’s atmospheric conditions that had become the standard for most of Terragen Space. And finally, rotational energy was gradually imprinted onto the megastructure using arrays of powerful thrusters and force field projectorson the outer surface, speeding up the Orbital until the interior surface experienced 9.81 meters per second of gravitational acceleration.
Now that the ring’s base structure was finally completed, it was time to add a proper biosphere and sophonts to the equation: Dream had publicly streamed the construction’s progress to the entirety of the Confluence, attracting plenty of attention from multiple groups of modosophonts and HyperAIs, both Terragen and other. Not wanting to pass up the opportunity to build and design their own new environment and society, many independent groups of colonists arrived in the system even before the megastructure’s completion, stationing themselves in orbit of the star with Dream’s permission as the owner of the star system.
As soon as the sophonts began inhabiting the Orbital, they began to design and create their own environments: intricate and balanced ecologies quickly populated the vast continents and the surrounding waters, while glittering cities rose through the clouds and under the oceans, populated by all kinds of Terragen species and other xenosophont clades. Separate cyberdemocratic polities and associations developed on the ring, with Dream With Me only providing resources to the groups and maintaining their politics and economies stable: after some time, these various polities officially formed a federation aptly known as the United Polities of Rheldann, the Banks Orbital’s new name. The fame of Dream’s project grew a lot throughout the wider Confluence, so much so that Nixhoeils, back then a Class-4 HyperAI and Coempireal Prince, gifted the system a connection to the Wormwork. Tourism and trade exploded for the United Polities, who also saw a sharp increase in immigration from non-Terragen that wished to experience this wide array of Terragen cultures all concentrated into a single megastructure.
In the six millennia hence, despite its fame decreasing considerably from its first centuries of existence, Rheldann has become one of the largest systems of the Mainlands aside from the Regional Capitals: in the modern era the system possesses multiple wormhole connections and has a population of 16 billion embodied sophonts belonging to many different clades, and more than 981 billion virtuals that reside in its vast computronium substrates. Dream With Me has also grown along with its creation, turning the dyson swarm’s collector elements into magmatter processors and ascending to the 4th class of hypersapience, thus becoming a Coempireal Prince.
The United Polities of Rheldann, though they were already in the path to become as such many millennia ago, are a highly diverse cyberdemocratic federation of post-scarcity independent polities and HyperAIs: its main constituent clades and cultures are of primarily Terragen ancestry, but considerable overlap with other alien cultures has developed in many of its polities.
Rheldann, as a Banks Orbital, alternates between highly urbanized and densely-inhabited cities, and sparse regions mainly left to their “natural” state. Most settlements are built either on the surface of the continents or underwater, although multiple aerostatic cities move around the ring. Public transportation to and from different settlements and areas of the Orbital is achieved through subterranean or above-ground vacuum trains, which have multiple stations raised high above the surface to connect with the passing flying cities. Transport within the settlements themselves is achieved through a wide variety of means, such as slidewalks, riverroads, maglev trains, bubblepods, submarines, ships, aircars, wingpacks, powerstilts and many others.
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A plate-shaped HabShip approaching the Orbital.
Following the signing of the open tourism and migration pacts between the Republic of United Worlds and the Confluence, the HabShip No Man Is An Island, But I Am had decided to tour around the Republic to pick up any willing passengers and bring them back to the Confluence, so that they could tour around the vast civilization. After some previous stops, its next destination was the Khulvreijna Star System, home to the renowned Rheldann Banks Orbital and a major centre of Terragen and Coempireal civilization.
On one of the beaches of the plate-shaped island resort, a relatively unassuming human man was sleeping carelessly on a beach chair, under the golden rays of the HabShip’s fusion microsun. He was of slightly below-average height, and had dark curly hair with a slightly tanned complexion: when embarking on the cruise he had hoped to be able to tan more, but the resort’s staff informed him that the microsun did not emit UV-radiation.
Suddenly, the sand besides him began to rise, reorganizing itself in the approximate shape of a floating tetrahedron. An appendage emerged out of one of its faces, and extended itself to gently tap on the man’s arm: it was the HabShip itself.
“Excuse me for bothering you sir, but we are about to reach your selected destination. Tracking procedures will commence in about thirty minutes.”
Startled by the unexpected interaction, Morgan “Starkiller”, the best pilot the Republic of United Worlds had ever seen, woke up.
