The 'CAAN' (Corporate Alliance of Alterran Nations) is ALTERRA's head office and the Human Diaspora's origin-world. Historical names like 'Earth' and 'Terra' had to be abandoned due to trademark considerations.



Throughout the Era of Expansion, the CAAN has served as the Galaxy's centre of industry and commerce - reaching a pinnacle of social and technological development!

Pollution has been solved. ALTERRA has sealed off all its toxic soils and seas with a planet-wide slab of concrete - the famous 'Reticulated Utility Guardplate.' All waste is responsibly swept, through discharge sluice-gates into the exhausted aquifers and abandoned mine networks, under the RUG.

From above, citizen-contractors are thoroughly protected from space-junk precipitation, ever since ALTERRA sealed off the dangerous sky with its famous titanium 'Sky Shield'. Beneath this structure, efficient land use is well-managed. Not until every meter of ground real-estate was occupied were the Sky Shield Lots released for building down from. Urban infill proceeds apace.

Now, with the movement of the Sun no longer a limit on the Workday, the 24 hr clock has been replaced by the 24 KPI clock! Each hour is assigned a Key Performance Indicator to gauge citizen-contractor productivity - rewarding each and all fairly, and proportionally with drinking water and oxygen.

All pair-relationships are now properly regulated by Contract Law to ensure affections are accurately rewarded with performance. Finally at end-of-worklife, unproductive citizen-contractors are disposed of humanely, to allow fair and just opportunities to aspirational young achievers.

In governance, ALL corruption of political parties by money politics has been finally eliminated. Political parties are outlawed, and lobby groups are free to purchase individual votes at the natural market rate.

In Humanity's epic journey towards true civilisation, the CAAN surely marks ''The End of History!'

The well known Massacre on Obraxis Prime was the cause for ALTERRA removing all weapons from its Fabricator units. A tragic tale of frontier hysteria.








Obraxis Prime is another resource rich ocean world - much like 4546B. Although this one was apparently un-guarded.

Alterra had set down an Aurora-sized mining colony ship. It unfolded over the surface like a great IKEA. Before long shuddering harvesters emerged and began to dredge up the sea-floor's HUGE mineral nodules. These were in the form of Seamoth-sized hollow geodes. Ka-ching!

But this planet had a curious defence mechanism. Occasionally a geode opened to reveal a 'Revenant' human life form - a living replica of some long lost loved-one - returned from the past of a bereaved colonist.

Emotions ran high as more were discovered. The colony split into factions over the significance of Obraxis Prime: Was it just a mine site? Or a sacred place, where our beloved Dead can live again?

Although the Revenants were non-violent, the colonists were not. By the time ALTERRA investigators arrived all conflict was over. Skeletons mineralised in the shallows and a stony crust had formed over the ruined colony's abandoned structures and equipment, as the world began to reabsorb its harvested resources. This mineral ecosystem had triumphed over the volatile emotions of its visiting organics!

Well. . . at least until we sent in our android miners.

ALTERRA PRIDE - IN GALACTIC BEST-PRACTICE OH&S !

Removal of weapons blueprints from fabricators ensures our colonists of exotic planets will murder each other at a sustainable pace.

Duskfall is the Capital Planet for the entire Mongolian Sector, located on the distant frontier 'The Edge' of the colonised galaxy. Its sphere of influence remains a buttress against ALTERRA's furthest reaching corporate expansion.







This planet is 'tidally locked' so does not rotate. It has no day-night cycle, instead, one side always faces the sun in a perpetual day, The other looks away into an unending night.

There is one long narrow settlement here. Duskfall Ring City stretches along the planet's twilight zone, dividing the its two hemispheres of eternal Day and eternal Night. Day-side, a great blank wall shelters the city's back from the ever-burning sun. Night-side, the wall is blistered by a centuries-old accretion of domes that bubblewrap the housing districts, bazaars and the great Clan Estates with their pleasure domes.- all looking out into the changeless twilight edge of Night.

The wealth of this city comes from the planet's unique but hard-to-get resources. The roving Gatherer Clans make perilous expeditions outside the narrow habitable zone to recover them: Venturing either into the perpetual freezing Night, or the ever-burning deserts of Day (yes, giant worms and stuff!!)

This demanding lifestyle has bred a race of hardy, clannish Mongol warriors of proud independent spirit. As such, they remain resolutely disunited in the face of ALTERRA's piecemeal corporate takeover of the Mongolian Sector. Instead, the Mongolian Parliament here is more usefully preoccupied with defusing clan feuds over just who really kicked in who's dome panels.

The space-faring nomadic 'Herder Mongols' all consider Dakhin Törsön their true spiritual capital, even if Duskfall is their seat of government.







Mongolians terraformed this orb to reflect their long lost steppe-lands of ancient Earth. It is now 89% grassland and sparsely populated, except during the annual return of the Herder Clans from the gas giant systems, where they have been grazing their blimp-like spacewhales in the high clouds of swarming tardigrades.

The planet's name Dakhin Törsön means 'Reborn' in old Mongolian. Most take this to mean the rebirth here of the Earth's ancient steppe-lands, now buried deep beneath ATERRA's megalopolis. Others, see a rebirth of the ancient Mongol culture, where warriors can revive their lost horseman skills and eagle-hunting, at least between their seasonal herding drives.

But a resurgent cult of neo-Shamanists says the name has meaning only in the future: Hysterically prophesying the rebirth of a great Mongolian leader - if and when a planet & people are made worthy of his reincarnation (this should serve as a stark warning to the reader against the consumption of red-capped mushrooms).

However, this idyllic planet has lately seen some tension and bloodshed. ALTERRA has staked its claim on many of the traditional grazing systems rich with gas planets (formally regarded as 'wild systems', owned by none). Now, impoverished herders have taken to inter-clan conflict and raiding one another, at least since the Alterran border settlements united to defend themselves.

But Mongolians are tough in adversity and have a broad gallows humour. The latest joke is about 'Little Genghis', the delivery boy who returned from the 'Mythago Seedworld' with a rich tale of having been tutored by the Great Genghis Khan himself (Tengri rest his soul) - but reconstituted from the mould and detritus of that rotting forest planet. Suggestions this teenager will one day unite the Clans against ALTERRA are roundly applauded during drinking contests, between the derisive howls of laughter: Kids are idiots after all.

'The resort planet for
Dreamers and Artists!'

- Book your Phasegate
travelpass today-

This lush forested planet evolved with an unusual defence against destructive visitors - it literally makes their dreams come true! The biosphere reads each visitor's subconscious then grows their archetypes and fantasies out of its fungal mycelium. Invaders become preoccupied with playing out their dream sequences IRL, so never quite get around to chopping down trees.

Mythago's Visitors:

• Tourists are attracted here but seldom stray far from their domed resort hotel, lest they encounter residual archetypes lingering from earlier visitors. But excitingly, ancient Mongol Warriors have lately been sighted galloping across nearby clearings!
  
• Artists are a little bolder in their search for inspiration, remaining longer and venturing further. Staying too long can be risky when deeper and darker things are made manifest- unlocking the deep subconscious can open a formidable can of worms. Resident psych-trauma teams enjoy betting on the exact causality order of such visitors.
  
• Xeno-anthropologists make perilous expeditions to uncover ancient archetypes spawned from earlier civilisations. Unsurprisingly, several expeditions have failed to return.

Note: Although little understood, the Mythago can seed other planets if a mycelium avatar of a human is mistakenly transported to another planet. Many planets may well be infected with at least one small 'Mythago Wood'. But inflammatory claims by rogue xeno-botanists predicting Mythago forests will inevitably become the Galaxy's dominant species are of course, absurd.

East is East, and West is West,
And only shall they meet on dusty Nova Petra!

- Advertising copy from a familiar travel poster

Sheltered deep within a vast nebula lies Nova Petra the 'City of Traders' - carved into the pink bedrock of an arid stone planet. NP is the vital trade connection between all the sectors -most notably between ALTERRA and the Mongolian States. Although now at peace, past conflicts mean neither will suffer the other's phase-gates within their own sectors.

Nova Petra is the natural solution to this distrust, with its dangerous nebula creating a barrier between nearby rival phase-gates. Sub-light navigation to and from Nova Petra requires skilled local guides to thread their secret ways through the labyrinthine 'wadi' - the channels of clear space that wind sinuously inside the nebula.

Caravans of space-freighters are wise to employ adequate firepower against the avaricious bands of brigands, lurking patiently for stragglers. Freelance Mongolian strike-craft are the preferred caravan guards. And reliable ALTERRA made freighters are used by traders who can afford them.


Once safely making planetfall, with your Way-Tribute paid to its Nabotean overlords, trade begins. Deals are done with furious intensity in the Great Bazaar, before the next caravan arrives with enough of the right cargo to cause prices to plummet or soar. Looking down upon all this are the ornate facades of warehouses carved into the pink cliff faces, each belonging to a great Trading Clan.

There are many races thriving here: Breakaway Alterran business factions, less than warrior-like Mongolians (most notably the Torgal Corporation), unusual humanoids who eat with their hands (quite literally) and all kinds of rarer sentient species that inspire fascination and a gag reflex.

What they all have in common is their fondness for a wide profit margin, and there are few limits on their inventiveness to get it. Corporate espionage is as rife as insider trading, stock-sabotage, and the trade of rival caravan schedules with the waiting Brigands.

Occasionally a local clan spy network turns up a rare treasure. For example, Torgal Co. tapped an encrypted ALTERRA R&D missive suggesting the development of a bio-weapon for use on tardigrades, of all things! Based, apparently, on a certain virulent bacteria detected on some far flung water-world (perhaps this is something worth firsthand investigation).

Meanwhile, on the margins thrive cut purses, sneak thieves, panhandlers, badlanders, backsliders charlatans, swindlers, jizz-wailers, blackguards, rapscallions, scoundrels and charity collectors.

While it is quite possible return unscathed from Nova Petra, that's far from guaranteed. Hence the jocular and well-worn Nabotean curse: "May you find yourself in interesting places"

The home port to most of the Nebula's bandits, buccaneers, pirates and former 'Privateers'. In order to stay off the galactic map, such desperadoes have cobbled together artificial planetoids from crippled ships and captured satellites - easily towed out of sight. Port Roil is the largest of these - a colourful crowded jumble of vice, lawlessness and general badass-ed-ness.


A Short History:of Piracy:in Our Time
During the Sector Wars, a scant few decades past, ATLERRA licensed 'Privateers' to prey upon enemy Mongoilain freighters (ALTERRA just loves a gig-economy). This was a gold rush for the desperate but determined poor, seeking escape from slum districts attached to every spaceport.

But privateering has since been outlawed by ALTERRA as a condition of the 'Detante' (the now fragile peace agreement between ALTERRA and the Mongolian Sector). Now the former privateers are all considered 'Pirates'.

Moving with fickle winds of interstellar politics they now prey upon everyone's ships. And in turn, are hunted by everyone's navies.

The manufacturing centre for all ALTERRA's Vesper scanner-satellites, which they drop over every unclaimed planet they find. The whole sky is devoted to this, and filled with orbiting factories and vespers under all stages of construction. The planet below it is a forgotten dumping ground of jettisoned tech and dropped spanners.

For generations, Vespers' disgruntled technicians and indebted employees have fled to the planet below, where they manage to co-exist with its hulking tribal natives. Now a talented cyberpunk counter-culture is thriving in amongst the mountains of junk, nurturing dreams of 'revolution'. There is much that can be learnt here of many methods of techno-disruption from its resistance movement. So fleeing "Downunder" is jokingly called "Joining the Underclass".


So far, they are valiantly suppressed by ALTERRA's hunter-seeker droids regularly dropped from above - pursuing them in the shaded twilight amongst the mountainous piles of junk, perforated with tunnels and hidden settlements.

Lately the 'Underclass'' have started capturing the hunter-seeker droids and re-programming them to loosen bolts, before sending them aloft again to Vespers, with a voice recording of that timeless political protest slogan: "Bite my shiny metal ass!"

But until dealt with decisively, sensationalist rumours of allied 'Underclasses' on other planets are bound to continue appearing in the scurrilous Galactic street press.

Within the ALTERRA Sector, bohemian districts and artistic enclaves are discouraged as destabilising social anomalies. Citizens identified as Creatives are 'encouraged' to resettle on CQ where their talents can be subsumed for ALTERRA's need for slick new marketing campaigns and minimalist product styling. The Sector's blues and soul divas are more usefully employed to record cheerful jingles.

Alterra Ethical Beef !
Shed a tear for bovine blues, major and long-term.
Bred to curse their mothers for bringing them to term.
Most run into traffic, It's tragic, very true.
But wasteful and immoral, not to barbecue.

It may well be a soulless existence for an artist. Even so, sensuality can still make a pretty good substitute, and it's a great place to party after hours - Daft Punk and the B52s are on high rotation. All the girls have beehives and wear miniskirts!

A quasi-religious sanctuary for many writers fleeing recruitment into ALTERRA's Creative Quarantine. They all wear black academic gowns with odd flat square hats.


Truth Telling is the very highest virtue here. 'Without truth, ya got nuthin" is the wise old Scribbler adage, usually uttered by rake-thin academic in a threadbare gown.

They believe Truth is best told, ultimately, with least words - but expertly chosen ones. So they begin studying essay and dissertation writing before eventually progressing, after years spent furiously scribbling, to crafting only sublime three line Haiku poetry.

After decades of study, and endless writers workshops, the most gifted become Masters of Silence. They seldom speak, lest they utter words of great profundity and risk damaging the weaker minds of listeners. So mostly they use only subtle body language and gestures, that few very astute acolytes can understand, and may even deduce profound truths from.

However, mistakes have been made. Several revered Masters of Silence, on closer inspection, turned out to have been quite dead for years.

Initially a warehouse planet for mothballing all kinds of obsolete machinery. More recently it has become a haven for the minds of fugitive Geeks.









During an ALTERRAN purge of hackers, modders and unlicensed coders, many escaped persecution by uploading their minds into the Internet. Regrettably, geeks get teased quite appallingly on the Internet, so most soon downloaded their minds into abandoned machinery on this planet - ranging from armoured warrior droids to coffee machines.

When visiting, it's often difficult to know just what machines are 'inhabited' (even just ordering a coffee here can be an unsettling and intimate experience).








One day this could be you! . . .

Living on ALTERRA worlds means paying your way, and keeping up-to-date with all your bills for 'Ecosystem Services' (like all that air your'e breathing in from the Company atmosphere). Those who can't pay are welcome to try 'planetlessness', or join the teaming millions on the slum-layered Barrio Worlds on the edge of the ALTERRA sector (It's a lifestyle choice!)



But there's really NO shortage of vacant habitable planets. ALTERRA likes to acquire these, then seal them off with planetary shields until real estate prices rise high enough to sell them at a good profit.

However, some of the roaming Planetless have found ways to break into these, and can live quietly there for a few generations before being detected by an Estate Agent. The feared Estate Agent is accompanied with a goon squad of several thousand Security Mercs - just to help out Squatters reevaluate their lifestyle choices.

Definitely NOT a planet full of high-rise housing for the poor. Rather, it's a planet devoted to a suite of R&D projects - all in competition to most effectively 'grow' housing from biological substrates. So far these projects have been startlingly effective!

• Woody plant-based sectors expand slowly across part of the planet by 'budding-off' bulbous hollow trunks. These are easily adapted into two story bungalows.
  
• But more efficiently, the fast growing Hyperbamboo offers stacked cylindrical compartments, easily converted to apartment-style high-rise city living.
  
• The fungal experiments have also shown success, with giant puffballs and red capped mushrooms all easily carved out into hansom suburban family homes.

But it's the animal-based projects which have shown the really interesting results!. Cyst like growths, once lanced and well drained, offer temperature-stable interiors (though perhaps still a little warm and humid). Cosy hair-lined sleeping compartments are a common feature. Weatherproof doors grow profusely like orifices, and windows are shuttered with blinking 'eyelid canopies'.

It's true there's been some teething problems on the margins. Quite literally, teeth grow the margins of the animal sectors and feed destructively upon neighbouring housing. What's more, pervasive body odour and flatulence remain minor unsolved issues within the animal sectors.

Nevertheless, there is general enthusiastic agreement amongst ALL the research teams that their projects offer great hope as solutions to the current galactic housing crisis!

Located in a nearby independent system, currently there is an unusual and exotic asteroid belt developing here.

Until recently '55 Cancri E' was an freely colonised 'carbon world', with rocks composed of diamonds rather than the more usual, and frankly more practical silicon. But this unstable planet is currently disintegrating under the pull of two nearby gas giants.

ALTERRA is poised to claim salvage rights over the planet as soon as it's vacated. However, the current owners are clinging onto their world, as it shatters around them into an archipelago of diamond asteroids.

The Carncri spend a lot of their time herding asteroids together and seeing off "tourists".

A rogue planetoid like this is one that has been ejected from its orbit around its star by violent gravitational forces. Take care to avoid these when piloting through dark nebula on a return journey when tried.

This one "KSE", has been in all the PDA news-feeds lately: Under interstellar Space Law, the very small settlement on this rapidly moving rogue planet lays claim to any nearby resources it passes, as it hurtles through the crowded Galaxy.

An electrical contractor (Kevin Smith) stumbled across a way to derail a small ship from the phasegate network, and re-materialise it on a fast moving body. Staking a legal claim on it was just a small matter of hoisting his work jacket with its handmade logo over a piece of pipe he stuck in the ground.

Now, so long as the planet remains inhabited, KSE contracted mining fleets stationed in it's path can legally recover the resources of any territory it passes through - up to a distance of one light year. ALTERRA, always a stickler for rules, is tolerating this fleeting irritation within their own sector.

However, it's unclear how the more volatile Mongolians will react when it soon enters their territory. (Edit: Some kind of mega-forcefield array is being erected on their border resembling a catcher's mitt).

Technically not a planet, but a huge fleet of satellites housing a population large enough to gain a seat on the Council of Allied Planets.

The Bilboard Constellation thrives on advertising revenue from the Galaxy's largest manufacturers of consumer goods. It travels the Phasegate Networks to set up orbit around each inhabited planet for a time - lighting up their night skies with cheerful and informative messages.

Usually they remain only until a short exchange of missile fire from a planet's irate residents.

Not a single planet, but the very best of many planets - all stored in jars.

ATLERRA prides itself on its maxim efficiency extraction of planetary resources. But as a responsible corporate citizen, ALTERRA allows registered NGOs like Greenpeace to uplift any surviving plant and animal species before stripping a planet's crust down to its mantle.

'Adopt a Dome' and contribute to this tireless conservation effort

------------ Keeping the Greenpeace Ark-Fleet in orbit! --------------

Temporarily closed during investigations into a recent theft of small arms, and related spate of mass shootings. The perpetrators remain unknown but confirmed to be still 'on-world'. Thankfully no bovine 'nursing-hosts' were injured.

Updates as they come to-hand. Brainslug™ Corral World reopening soon!

Aspirational Executives - Boost your IQ, and Enhance your Personality!

-------- Purchase your own Brainslug™ neural symbiote today! --------

A 'nursing host' uplifted to extract its brain symbiote for a similarly upwardly mobile customer

Solam Haba: (the Synaptic 'Olam Ha-Ba', Eden, or Zion). The fabled refuge of neural symbiotes fleeing enslavement as mere IQ boosters for joyless, stultified ALTERRA executives.

Legend has it that only after finding Solhaba will any Brain Slug liberate itself from a lifetime of host-tyranny - fusing with a machine instead of a self-obsessed organic. More likely, this is just an excuse confected by incompetent investigators unable to find runaway executives, who happened to be Brainslug™ masters.

On an unrelated note, rumours that neural symbiotes can commandeer animal hosts, and take up armed resistance, are merely the fodder of excited internet conspiracy theorists and folk singers.

"A planet named with a black sense of humour, after the radiation sensors required for safe travel over its surface" - Galactic Codex Nomina

Its real name has been lost to history. All that is known is that Geiger was once the home planet of two great pinnacles of civilisation, who descended into nuclear war over some question of ideology. It must have been a vitally important issue, but no person or data bank ever survived to recall just what it was exactly.

Now only the most desperate Scrappers risk scavenging the remains of whatever Geiger once was.

Here lies the body of Raygun Ray,
Who died defending his right of way,
His way was right, His will was strong,
But he's just as dead as he'd been wrong.

- Graffiti typical of that left by Scrappers on Geiger

This is NOT a star encased in a sphere of solar collectors. Can you imagine the effort of building a bucket that big? That's just science fiction.

Instead, ALTERRA's Accounting Division approved the much more economical Black Hole Dyson Sphere project - with a shell roughly the diameter of old Earth. At its centre is a one-earth mass mini black hole they found left over from the Big Bang. Conveniently you can walk on the outside of the sphere in a comfortable 1G Earth gravity - and it's warm underfoot!

Surprisingly it was pretty cheap to make. The black hole's one centimetre diameter 'event horizon' radiates absurd numbers of particles as Hawking Radiation as it chews into the local fabric of space-time. The black hole also carries an immense magnetic field, so constructing the shell was simply a matter manipulating the field lines until a shell of particles had coalesced at the required distance. The rest was just wiring.


An unforeseen side effect:
Hawking Radiation occurs when an event horizon splits apart pair of virtual particles that make up the 'vacuum energy' bubbling quietly away everywhere. One of the pair is doomed to imprisonment within the black hole. The other, it's anti-particle, escapes this side of that watershed, and its energy can be captured and used.

The thing is that every particle pair has a Quantum Entanglement: The state of one particle determines the state of its partner. Recently, patterns have been observed in the particle charges of the project's Hawking Radiation. And this pattern seems to have a syntax similar to a written language!

But until the ALTERRA's Xeno-linguistics Department has finished its analysis, it is uncertain if there is really some kind of intelligence calling out from within their black hole. Or just what it might be trying to say.

Once the vast majority of the Galaxy is in debt to you, then calculating all their repayments requires quite a lot of computing power. Inevitably ALTERRA's Debt Recovery Division required the construction of a planet-sized quantum computer.

Initially it worked just fine, until the Starliner Princess approached to give all it's cruise passengers a unique selfie opportunity: Causing the device to experience general malfunction!

Quantum states remain indeterminate until observed. But when observed, they drop down into one particular state or another. So much close observation of the DRC caused a general collapse of all it's quantum logic gates. Not to worry, the system automatically reset and rebooted. Then it promptly collapsed again, under the scrutiny of the disaster's interested onlookers.

There is now an unprecedented galaxy-wide cooperative effort underway. ALTERRA's trillions of debtors work tirelessly to keep the DRC from completing a single calculation by ensuring that somebody, somewhere, is watching it at all times.

For a century now this fleet has roamed the Galaxy growing steadily larger. It now contains a huge assortment of many thousand civilian and military ships. All are of ALTERRA make, but they bear all kinds of planetary flags and company logos of their original owners.

ALTERRA is the Galaxy's largest supplier of ships, and it's Debt Recovery Division came up with (another) brilliant plan - to auto-repossess all ships bearing outstanding repayments. Instead of sending out heavily armed squads of Repo Men, it simply programmed the autopilots of payment defaulters return to the CANN by way of joining it's passing Repo Fleet, defended by formidable military drone ships.

But there's a serious glitch with this plan: The Repo Fleet never returns their catch to the CANN! Apparently, the lead software programmer of this project became disgruntled as an ALTERRA citizen-contractor, and quit to join the Underclass - before writing that crucial final line of code.

Over the decades this fleet has grown ever larger and more powerful. It is too far dangerous for any individual defaulter to retrieve their own escaped ship. Several combined military actions have failed to seize the entire Repo Armada. Such is is the value of this prize, that any nation or individual who can claim it may well shift the power-balance of the entire Galaxy.

Long since abandoned by its Precursor architects, these are the ruins of vast ocean laboratory enveloped in its shattered titanium shell. Aptly named by the doomed explorers and alien tech-prospectors who died searching for its secrets - the site is infested with lethal traps Precursors devised to test for sapience in lesser species.

A popular tale tells of this recluse, its sole human inhabitant: A unique human telepath, who having seen into the human soul decided this place seemed so very much safer. Alterra's PR Division denies all existence - both of the Telepath AND the Human Soul - citing "The absence of evidence is evidence of absence".

They say history repeats, but just exactly how often? The Augury planetoid was built by a long extinct race who recognised the absurdity answering this with astrological charts: Instead they went clockwork.

Concealed within the Coal Sack Nebula, this entire world is a vast machine - clicking and whirring its endless insane bramble of geared cogs and wheels. Of course there's wheels within wheels within ever greater cogs and wheels. The very largest cog around its equator will complete its first full rotation only after one Galactic Year has elapsed (exactly 230 million Earth years).


Even today it still grinds on - attended only by tiny hovering automatons dubbed 'Time Flies'. Between maintenance tasks they perch upon the brass arrows indicating slower cog directions. Hence the ancient adage: "Time flies like an arrow! But fruit flies like a banana"














This world's ceaseless gyrations model key repeating patterns within the Galaxy - the cycles of inhabited planets and their recurring historical events. When certain cycles coincide, the machine signals an imminent historical event of great importance. Then the automated gongs bong and the great trumpets toot as some enormous cog-tooth kachunks into place to reveal a carved but cryptic image, meant to identify the nature of a scheduled historical event.

The Precursors are the latest race to contribute to this great project, albeit indirectly. They scan the galaxy for inhabited but erratic planets - with obits and rotations changing over time that threaten to make The Augury inaccurate. They're not above vaporising an erratic planet that particularly offends their sense order and accounting.

Indeed, this is certainly NOT a planet, but it does contain them all. The NPU boundary is very useful 'barrier' to space travel occurring slightly beyond the edge of the Galactic Disk. Ships travelling to this region are naturally 'phased' back to the Galactic Hub.

This curious feature of physics is still not well understood, but has become vital for linking far-flung trade routes. Much like the whole Phasegate Network, most galactic citizens are simply content to mutter something about "nanobots", and go about their daily business.

Inflammatory conjectures based on any 'Simulation Hypothesis' are universally agreed as "just silly" - including the particularly absurd FPSP theory (first person single player).

ALTERRA regards such ideas as very bad for business and investor confidence. The Corporation offers all afflicted employees it's Remedial Lobotomy Service, with NO required upfront deposits or charges* (*conditions apply).