Communiqué from
Juringen Helkarkennen, W-MR-ff2-2cf93d
Senior Supervisor, Core Border Region
Western Spiral Material Management Division

transcribed by David Artman

General Introduction

Welcome to the Human Stellar League!

Your star system has been approved for Standard Trade Status in the Human Stellar League (HSL) with all the rights and privileges that Status entails. Though your planet’s history does not record the seeding of your populace, we assure you that we have watched the progress of your colony for the past four thousand years and are now confident that you are ideologically and technologically advanced enough to resume membership in the galactic community.

Local History Adjustment Briefing

Your system’s current historical record holds the view that your race is evolved from a local fauna indigenous to the tropical latitudes of your home planet. This view is actually a confusion of the facts. Your system was originally seeded by Colony Slowboat W-373 “Ortomoshtik” which carried the template for your home planet’s entire ecosystem as well as 20,000 colonists from the Rigil System who had been genetically engineered to survive in your rather low gravity and oxygen rich atmosphere.

Unfortunately, those colonists were highly religious and were led by a traditionalist government that encouraged ‘natural’ living. The only allowed tools for written communications were inefficient data storage devices fabricated from local materials of rather less durability than the HSL-standard OptiCrystal. As a result, over the first thousand years of your colony’s expansion, historical and material management records were transcribed onto some form of plant fiber pulp using water and animal fat based inks. These records are lost today, since the colonists stopped annually uplinking through TessComm (q.v.) to report their status to the HSL. At the time, senior MMD personnel did not think much of this strange colony’s lack of communication and set a revisit by HSL officials as a very low priority. This was our error and for it we do apologize profusely.

It seems that during that first millennium, the colony divided on a number of religious points (no surprise) and splintered into isolated tribes. Within three hundred years, the Common tongue spoken throughout the HSL was lost to your ancestors as secret religious cants took primacy. When our agents finally made their rounds to your system, they found barbaric, warlike peoples scattered across the planet and nearly all of the HSL-standard technology destroyed (except, of course, your primary satellite, which is the CS Ortomoshtik). The people were in no state to be accepted into the HSL, even had they wanted to, for their oral history tradition had thoroughly corrupted the facts of Metaphysics into spiritual and god-like forces. The agents, with much regret, activated a Quarantine Beacon in far solar orbit and the HSL waited.

Most of your more recent history is correct after this period, once you sort through the pseudo-scientific theories of origin and look at the records only. Your current level of technology has sent you to your nearest in-system neighbors and you are, admirably, well on the way to finishing basic fusion tools. You have finally come full circle, reaching the intellectual point at which the Ortomoshtik’s crew first started. Your system will now be brought up to speed with the HSL Mean Technology Level and incorporated into the HSL’s political structure and material management procedures.

Your Rights as HSL Citizens

Just because you are a new system in the HSL does not mean that your local traditions are to be cast aside. In fact, the League encourages races and systems and regions to maintain their unique customs and practices. The only exceptions to these liberties are detailed later in the Political Structure and Legal System section of this communiqué; generally, these exceptions protect fellow Citizens and Unlinked Systems from exploitation and harm and will likely be no surprise to you, given your local mores as we understand them.

As a Linked System, your race is guaranteed System Representation in each of the three Executive Divisions of the HSL (q.v.). Further, each Citizen has the right of vote in Regional and System Appointments to these Divisions; every one of you will help to decide who will speak for your system in the Region and for your Region in the Executive Council.

Also, all HSL Linked Systems are provided with the plans and training necessary to attain Mean Technology Level and are given credit in the Material Management Division Bank to set up business relationships in good faith with the galaxy as a whole. As soon as your local computer networks are upgraded, your system will have full access rights to the HSL CompNet and general access to TessComm channels in your area. As with every newly Linked system, your local government has Full Right of Access to the Prime Pol for your star to use as your local government sees fit. All extra-system traffic will be barred from entering this frequency of TessSpace by the standard Prohibitions (q.v.); this barring is enforced by the League Navy in conjunction with the Watcher’s Guild. More on this will follow in later sections.

In closing, your people are considered by the Human Stellar League Executive Council to be fine examples of recovered colonists, stranded by the whims of your ancestors and left to struggle back to your original glory. Now that you have reawakened to your galactic heritage, we spread our limbs to you in offer of warmest embrace, as a father would a son thought lost to war. We welcome you and anxiously await your first contributions to The Diversity.

Mean Technology Level Briefing

Fundamentals of Metaphysics

Though your local scientists are admirably well-advanced, there are a few elements of Metaphysics which they have overlooked in their focus on material progress.

The first element is that of TessSpace or Tessaract Space, Essential Space, 3D, or “Soup”. This is basically the cohesive element of the universe, a force which binds every massive object in our dimension with every other. It generates the phenomena of gravity, light, strong & weak nuclear attraction , and the ‘phantom forces’ like centripetal force and momentum. Its composition at the third dimension is referred to as Pol—short for polarity gravity flux lines. These Pols are the noodles in the soup.

The second element is psychic force, which is the material tie to TessSpace, the link between time and space, the quasi-dimension between 4D and 3D. Certain sentient beings are capable of harnessing this force; they are called, not surprisingly, Psies.

These two elements combine to form the underpinning of our League. By using psychic force to shape and chart Essential Space, the Metaphysicians of the HSL are able to effect instantaneous travel of mass between any two massive bodies as well as communication between massive bodies. The monitoring of these channels, these Pols, between massive bodies is the responsibility of the Watcher’s Guild, an elite group of trusted Psies who also maintain communications between worlds using telepathic abilities.

Instantaneous travel is effected by TessDrives, tremendous gravity sails which pull a vessel to light speed and fire a particle cannon ahead of the ship. At that moment, the Drive Engineer will focus willpower to ‘tear’ space and drop the Drive and anything tethered behind it into TessSpace. Then, the Coordinator and Sailors join in, using their psychic abilities to both perceive the ‘progress’ of the craft and steer it along Pols between massive bodies. Psies must do this because any sentient with a lower than Level III Sensitivity can not perceive time in 3D. That is why it is called instantaneous travel. Unfortunately for those with Sen3, if one is riding Pols, one perceives time as if the distance were being covered at the speed of light. Thus, a ten light-year trip will seem to all Sen3s to take ten years, even though the Sen2 and Sen1 perceive it as being instantaneous.

Instantaneous communications uses the same technique, but with fixed solar orbit cannons and laser light communicators. It uses more power to tear and requires someone to be ready to receive on the other end with a light collector, but has the advantage of requiring only one Psi to open the link, and that Psi does not need to traverse the distance. All of CompNet is networked on the interstellar level by TessComm.

But do not let all of this lead you to believe that the HSL rests on the laurels of these two achievements. Bioengineering grants humans extraordinary abilities and immunities, cybernetics extend those abilities and can make a man invulnerable, for the right price. Further, the HSL can terraform an otherwise hostile environment to be more suited to humanity. If that is too expensive or can not be completely done, we alter humans to fit the environment, creating an ecosystem tailored to the environment of the planet to support them in their new life on the world. In fact, a combination of these techniques was done to your home world prior to sending the Ortomoshtik.

Thus, between the advancement of humanity in its day-to-day life and the transfer of data and material between the stars, the Human Stellar League Metaphysicians and Psies strive to weave a strong fabric of relations between all of humanity’s children.

Political Structure and Legal System

The Human Stellar League is divided into three political functions and three spatial sectors.

The three arms of the Executive Council are the Watcher’s Guild, the Materials Management Division, and the Metaphysicians. The Watcher’s Guild is composed of the galaxy’s most trusted Psies and is charged with enforcing the legal use of Pols and guarding against the most dangerous enemies to society. They are also charged with maintaining regulations for sanity laws and criminal reform as well as monitoring against the genetic crimes of False-Psying and Psi-Boosting. The Materials Management Division is an elected body responsible for the highest level distribution planning for the galaxy. They maintain the spacelanes as well as administer to the Navy and provide millennial planning for the course of human expansion. When there is a catastrophe, the MMD marshals resources to provide relief and/or defense for the blighted area. Finally, the Metaphysicians are the brain of the HSL. They coordinate galaxy-wide research efforts, Fringe exploration, CompNet standards, and the general advancement of human understanding and dissemination of information across the galaxy. The MPs are also in charge of the greatest of HSL endeavors: The Diversity. The Diversity is the grand museum of the galaxy, an entire region of space devoted to habitats, displays, and samples of every discovery made by mankind since the inception of the League over one billion years ago. It is for The Diversity that we live, it is our god, it is our goal, it is the raison d’étre.

The three Sectors of the HSL are as follows: Western Arm, Eastern Arm, and FrinCore. Each of these sections are, in turn, divided into scores of Regions each, and it is on the Regional level that a given stellar system of peoples is represented in the HSL. The Western and Eastern Arms are precisely what their names imply; FrinCore is a special Sector which represents the Fringe regions at the edge of the galaxy -cold and vast- and the Core regions near the Big Egg -fiery and crowded with novas. Most of the residents of the Regions in these sectors are fiercely independent -so much the better for The Diversity. Each Sector is further divided into Sub-Sectors and they into Regions. The Sub-Sectors Standard is used simply to provide a layer of representation in the HSL which addresses multi-Regional, but not necessarily Sectoral, concerns. The Sub-Sectors are, from Core to Fringe: Core Border, Wides, SpeckleVoid, and Fringe Border. The Regions are too numerous to mention here, but your home world is in the Gorht-Kythpall Region, SpeckleVoid, Western Arm.

Lastly, as a Citizen you are guaranteed certain rights and are required to respect the Prohibitions.