Glossary

Terms that common citizens would know. (Note these may, or may not, be correct, and the list may, or may not, cover all terms...)

Balla-Drubbik Drive

The drive which allows faster-than-light travel, via an extradimensional energy well.

Ben Yulin

Tall, swarthy, known as a skillful and imaginative engineer, rumoured to rather enjoy partying.

Confederacy

Humans have spread over a large fraction of the galaxy. Each worlds' government sends a representative to the Council to vote on policy matters (think of the United Nations).

Council

The overall government ruling over all humanity and all human worlds.

Councillor Alaina

Councillor Lee Pak Alaina, representative of New Beijing, she's been in office for almost as long as anyone can remember. She has considerable experience and great skill as a diplomat, and is said to be in charge of the Police.

Councillor Antor Trelig

Rumoured to be crooked, known to be a big shot and holding considerable sway over the Council, controlling and ruling New Harmony as his own personal playground. Suspected of links with the sponge syndicate, this man is tall, muscular and handsome.

Creator Race

A race of beings, spread across the known region of the galaxy, who had arisen so long ago they must have been the first intelligence to develop after the Big Bang explosion. They left tantalizing city structures on worlds billions of years dead, yet no minor artifacts of any sort. And beneath each of their planets was an artificial layer, up to two kilometers thick, a mysterious quasi-organic computer, purpose unknown. The entire race appears to have vanished completely, all at once, leaving no other clues behind them, other than hexagons and the number six being important to them.

Dr Gilgram Zinder

A noted physicist with certain unorthodox views concerning the Creator Race that made him unpopular with the scientific community at large. He believed the Creator Race converted matter into energy just by wishing it so. He's rumoured to have built a highly advanced AI to help with his researches.

Rejuve

Rejuvenation is a very expensive medical process that is available to reverse the effects of aging. Some memory losses however cannot be reversed.

Sponge

An alien sponge spawned on a sea world, now interdicted by the Confederacy.
A nice planet, mostly ocean but dotted with millions of islands connected in a network of shallows. A tropical climate except at the poles. It looked like a paradise, and, tests had shown nothing that could hurt the human race. A test colony—two, three hundred people—was landed on the two largest islands for the five-year trial, as per standard procedure. Volunteers, of course, the last remnant of frontiersmen in the human race.
If they survived and prospered, they owned the world—to develop it or do with it what they would. But because man’s test instruments could analyze only the known and the theoretical, there was no way to detect a threat so alien it hadn’t even been imagined. That was the reason for the trial in the first place.
So those people had settled in and lived and loved and played and built on their islands.
For almost a month.
That was when they started to go mad, the people of that colony. They regressed—slowly, at first, then increasingly faster and faster. They turned into primitive beasts as the thing that had caught them ate away at their brains. They became like wild apes, only without even the most rudimentary reasoning ability. Finally they died, from their inability to cope with even the basics of eating and shelter. Most drowned; some killed one another.
And out of their bodies, eventually, grew the pretty flowers of the island, in new profusion.
Scientists speculated that some sort of elemental organism—based not on carbon or silicon, but on the iron oxides in the rocks of their pretty island—interacted through the air not with them but with the synthetic food rations they brought to help them until they could develop their own native agriculture.
And they had eaten it, and it had eaten them.
But there had been one survivor—one woman who had hidden in the huge beds of alien sponge along a particularly rocky shoreline. Oh, she had died, too—but almost three weeks later than the others. When she no longer returned each evening to sleep in the sponge bed.
The natural secretions of the sponge acted as a retardant—not as an antidote. But as long as a victim had a daily intake of the secretion, the mutant strain seemed inactive. Remove the substance—and the degenerative process began once again. But scientists had taken some samples of the mutant strain and of living sponge with them to study in their labs on far-off worlds.
All of it was thought to have been destroyed afterward—but evidently some had not been. Some had been taken by the worst of elements and was developed in their own labs in unknown space.
The perfect commodity.
By secretly introducing the stuff into people’s food, you gave them the disease. Then, when the first symptoms came and baffled all around you, the merchant would come. He would ease the pain and cause normality by giving you a little bit of sponge.
The Confederacy wouldn’t help you. It maintained a sponge colony on that interdicted world for the afflicted, where one could live a normal, if very primitive, existence and soak each night in a sponge bath. If, that is, the victim could be gotten there before the disease became too progressive to bother.
The sponge merchants chose only the most wealthy and powerful—or their children, if their world had families of any sort. There was no charge for the daily sponge supply, oh, no. You just did as they asked when they asked.
There was even the suspicion that so many rulers of the Confederacy were hostage to the stuff now that that was the reason no real search for an antidote or cure had ever been started.

Weapons Locker

The majority of people seem to think of it as some sort of giant safe that holds all the terror weapons their superiors think are too monstrous to employ.

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