Alien life?
In all the human history and exploration leading up to Shayla’s time, no extraterrestrial life has ever been discovered. All people, plants, and animals referenced originated from Earth.
Imperial measure
I chose to express units of length in Imperial units – feet, yards, miles – rather than metric that people might feel more appropriate to a far-future space- faring civilization. This was done to give the story a deeper sense of antiquity. Of course, these are just storytelling analogues, because twentieth-century measures and languages will be long dead and forgotten by Shayla’s time.
The universe in a nutshell
In Shayla’s time, the official Imperial census records 523 inhabited systems.
These are spread unevenly through a disc of space roughly two thousand light years across and five hundred light years thick. This is a tiny fraction of the galaxy, which is a hundred thousand light years across. To give some perspective on what this means for travelers, the fastest ship takes about two months to cross from one border of human space to the other.
Of course, inhabited systems account for only a tiny fraction of stars in this region of space. The common convention, other than for navigational charts, is for maps to show only inhabited systems and to ignore the vast numbers of stars in between.
Just over half of these systems are under the control of six Grand Families, either directly ruled, or through long-standing allegiances. The Family Skamensis is the strongest with 83 systems. The Family dom Calvino are the paupers at the table with a puny 27.
The remaining systems are independent, or owe only transient allegiance, but with these six power-hungry sharks in the pool, independence is difficult and precarious. Some worlds are strong enough, either individually or by banding together, to keep the Grand Families at bay. At the other extreme, many “outworlds” on the periphery of civilization are too small and remote to be worth subduing.
A privileged few, the Freeworlds, maintain their neutrality by treaty. Freeworlds usually have a dedicated purpose, or charter, and establish themselves as highly specialized centers of excellence for academics, artists, or artisans. The Families are prepared to honor the Freeworlds’ independent status in return for the strictly impartial value that these worlds bring to all of humanity.
It is no coincidence that Freeworlds also typically lack natural resources worth fighting over.
Imperial census-taking
When comparing one interstellar empire with another, census officials and financial lizards talk about things like populations, manufacturing capacity, and gross domestic product.
However, most ordinary emperors just count how many inhabited systems they own.
In the early days of interstellar expansion, people counted inhabited worlds, meaning those where there was an established human presence.
This measure soon gave rise to problems and ambiguities. Alongside the primary world, do you count all the moons with permanent bases? Some of them were nothing more than observation posts manned by a handful of staff, clearly not worth counting, but others were larger than some planetary colonies. What about those planets with no surface populations, but with a thriving flock of orbiting bases? What about the large mining populations spread thinly through an ore-rich asteroid belt? Exactly what constitutes a “world” was becoming a nightmare of arbitrary and meaningless definitions.
An inhabited system is defined simply as a star system containing a self-supporting permanent population. This measure makes no mention of how the population is distributed or housed, so avoids many of the problems of earlier definitions. The “self-supporting” qualification has some more specific definitions attached, but essentially ensures that the system has enough critical mass of population and resources to be significant in political terms.
A bit of history
The events in Ghosts of Innocence and related books take place roughly sixteen thousand years in the future.
A thousand years from our twenty-first century lives, humanity developed practical interstellar travel. Not a moment too soon, the first ships left a climate-ravaged and polluted Earth behind and began looking for new homes.
Within a few decades, the expanding search found planets suitable for colonisation. Not yet truly habitable, they were at least rocky worlds with atmospheres, liquid water, and in stable orbits in their stars’ “Goldilocks zones.”
The fledgling colonies made extensive use of geoengineering techniques that had been refined over the centuries in desperate attempts to keep Earth itself habitable. Decades of patient terraforming bore fruit three hundred years after the departure of the first interstellar explorers, when the first colonists were finally able to walk freely under alien skies.
Moderately peaceful expansion continued for another four millennia.
But by then, many early colonies had grown strong enough to rival Earth itself, and began to exert not only independence from an increasingly fragile central rule, but desires to establish their own multi-system mini empires.
Good old human nature reasserted itself, and the spreading civilisation disintegrated into a thousand years of vicious conflict. Terraforming was slow and cripplingly expensive, so truly habitable worlds were prized targets. Many worlds lost contact and degenerated to a pre-industrial state. Many perished, unable yet to sustain themselves. Only a few kept both the technological knowledge and the industrial capacity to build starships.
Starfaring society re-grew from these centres, which eventually hosted the ruling Grand Families. The world of Magentis lay in a region relatively rich in habitable planets, and was always the most powerful. Its ruling family established itself as a dominant and stable force over the next eight thousand years.
It is worth noting that at no time did the Earthly explorers discover native life on any planets they visited. All people, plants, and animals, can trace their lineage back to Earthly origins.
Ironically, by Shayla’s time Earth itself is nothing more than a little-known legend. Earth’s dwindling resources were spent with the effort of supporting those early colonies. Its location was lost in the disintegration and rebirth of interstellar civilisation. Its people have likely regressed to primitive, non-technological cultures if they survived at all. It is out there still, waiting to be rediscovered, just another failed world from before The Collapse.
Ian S. Bott, Writer and artist 