- 15th of March, 0 BBT
- Confluence of Empires, Terragen Space
- Khulvreij Star System
- United Polities of Rheldann
The Rheldann Orbital, seen from a distance.
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As an inhabited system of the Confluence, Khulvreij was old, very old. Originally surrounded by a small and unassuming planetary system, colonization efforts first began around the highly-metallic yellow dwarf in the 6200s BBT through the work of the terragen HyperAI Dominion Dream With Me. The recently ascended intelligence, acting as part of the primary corewards wavefront of Confluent expansion in the first millennium of the empire, wished to create a new center of urbanized civilization by building a banks orbital. While this might not have seemed so impressive to the sensibilities and standards of the modern era, given how common vast structures of that scale had become throughout the Confluence, back in those days solid megastructures bigger than McKendree cylinders could be counted on the hand of a baseline human.
During the century of carefully-planned work necessary to dismantle and transform the natural resources of the system into their vast new world, Dream had publicly streamed the construction’s progress to the entirety of the Confluence, attracting more and more attention from the core systems and older colonies where the presence of civilization had already started to become ancient and capillary. Not wanting to pass up the opportunity to build and design their own novel environments and societies, many independent groups of colonists arrived in the system even before the megastructure’s completion, stationing themselves in orbit of the star within safe areas selected by Dream, by law the owner of Khulvreij.
As soon as the construction process reached completion and the colonists could move in to inhabit the orbital, the development of its surface exploded in both speed and diversity: 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 and non-terragen species. Separate polities and associations developed on the ring, with Dream With Me (their mind now residing in the megastructure’s vast computronium banks) 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 orbital’s new name. The fame of Dream’s project quickly grew and spread throughout the wider Confluence, so much so that Nixhoeils, back then still a Coempireal Prince, gifted the system an Astroduct connection to the nascent Wormwork.
In the six millennia hence, despite the fame of its first centuries having long faded in favour of newer and far larger projects, 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 831 billion virtuals that reside in its vast computronium substrates. Dream With Me has also grown along with their creation, turning the system’s dyson swarm into a processor cluster and ascending to become a Coempireal Prince.
In the modern day 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 lower-level HyperAIs: its main constituent clades and cultures are of primarily Terragen ancestry, though with considerably non-Terragen overlap.
Despite its population, Rheldann still follows the average of most other megastructures and worlds in the Confluence: its habitable surface mostly consists of sparse regions usually left to their “natural” state with very, very low population density, interrupted by a few highly urbanized and densely-inhabited cities. Most buildings and settlements are built either on land or underwater, although multiple aerostatic towns and dwellings can be encountered moving around the ring’s atmosphere. Public transportation to and from different settlements and areas of the orbital is achieved through subterranean or above-ground vacuum trains, while transport within the settlements themselves is achieved through a wide variety of both public and private means.
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A plate-shaped HabShip approaching the Orbital.
Following the signing of the open tourism and migration pacts between the Union of Human States and the Confluence, the HabShip No Man Is An Island, But I Am had decided to tour around the Union 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 throughout the outer regions and the mainlands, its next destination was Khulvrei, home to the renowned Rheldann 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”, one of the best pilots the UHS had ever seen, woke up.
