Across the Sea of Stars

An organization dedicated to the emancipation of sentient machines in the Coterie. They are not above using aggressive (some would say terrorist) tactics to bring freedom and civil rights for intelligent mechanoids. The ALF is illegal on several worlds.

Medical treatments and drugs that retard, stop or even reverse the aging process. Additional processes provide rejuvenating effects. Antiagathic regimens are common in most advanced Coterie races.

A being that is a symbiotic combination of the biological and the mechanical. Synonymous with cyborg.

An artificially created genetic duplicate of another creature. Most advanced Coterie societies rely on cloning techniques to grow non-sentient replacement parts or bodies for regeneration. Most Coterie societies have laws against creating sentient duplicates of living beings for any purposes.

Hyperspace ain't what they used to show in the old vids. It's not a exactly a place that you go to, even if you sort of do go there. The Corrado Converters wrap a hyperspatial field around the object in question. This lets you race through a pastel-colored extrusion of normal space at speeds far in excess of the speed of light. You still have to watch out for everything that might get in the way, though. The Corrado Field is no protection from all the junk that's out there!

There are limits, too. A long time ago, ships would get lost, unexpectedly, vanishing from normal space without a trace.

The problem is mass. Too much mass makes the Corrado Field leaky. Atoms and molecules and other things get sucked into the field. They lose their energy in the process, dumping it into the field. This makes the field leakier, and more things get sucked in. It's what the number-crunchers call "positive feedback." It positively sucks when this starts to happen.

To make matters worse, those things that get sucked in get cold. They freeze into hydrogen ice and semi-fluid helium, which is really weird shit. In the old days, poor design could turn a ship into a ball of ice hurtling to its doom at hundreds of times the speed of light. This is called Corrado Runaway.

So, spaceship designers make sure to calculate careful margins of safety. It's also why starship lines only let you carry on two bags of luggage, unless you're in first class.

Hyperspace and the Ship Engines, excerpted from
An Introductory Text for Hypermechanics for High Schoolers
(twelfth edition, Riche-Monde Interstellar Publications, Ltd.)

A scale of measurements that quantify the base characteristics of most races in the galaxy. The Edwards-Hewitt scale provides a common way of defining environmental needs, edible food supplies, and other important considerations.

The usually-difficult moment when a galactically naïve culture is exposed to the truth of the existence of other and different sentient beings in the Universe. First Contacts can have a profound influence on the contacted culture, which is why the Coterie has trained First Contact teams for these situations. A First Contact with a psychologically immature or unprepared culture can have disastrous repercussions.

A region in spacetime where gravity acts in an unexpected manner. Typically, these are the results of cosmic strings or other detritus from the Big Bang, almost invisible sources of intense gravitational energy that bend, warp, or even tear the fabric of the spacetime continuum.

A condition where a planetary atmosphere retains solar radiation, heating the planet. This is usually the result of carbon dioxide, water vapor, or methane in the atmosphere. Excessive amounts of these (or other) chemicals can result in a runaway overheating of the planetary ecosphere.

A superstable transuranic element rarely found in nature. Most hooverium is manufactured through nuclear transmutation. Hooverium is a key component in many high-energy systems and processes.

Often poorly described as a parallel set of dimensions, hyperspace is simply a region inside a hyperfield where the normal relativistic (Einsteinian) rules of motion do not apply. Movement in hyperspace is not limited to the speed of light. Ships in hyperspace can travel between distant star systems in times that are short enough for travel and commerce to be practical.

The fifth Lagrangean point of a two body gravitational system. Take any two major nearby gravitational sources that are moderately distant from any other significant ones, such as a planet and its moon. These two bodies will have the greatest gravitational pull on any much-smaller third particle in the system. There are five significant places in this two body system where the gravitational pull of both bodies cancel out, where it won't take any energy to keep a third particle in one place. These are the Lagrangian points. The first three, known as L₁, L₂, and L₃, are unstable. Move out of the position and one of the bodies will pull on you more than the other, pulling you out of position. L₄ and L₅, on the other hand, are stable. The gravitational effects tend to keep you in that position if you start to drift away. That makes these points ideal for space stations.

They are also referred to as L-1 through L-5.

A process that wipes the mind of all memories, so that a new, constructed persona can be imprinted on a brain. The Loss of Existence is used as a form of capital punishment by the judicial system of many races across the Coterie. Frequently, the imprinted persona serves an injured community, as a form of restitution.

A unit of cultural information representing a basic idea. A unit of imitation that propagates from brain to brain through a culture, much like a virus spreads through a biological population.

The creation and use of engineering constructs and devices on an atomic and molecular scale. Molecular machines and devices the size of atoms.

Typically, an O'Neill colony, a hollow cylinder kilometers in length and diameter, constructed in orbit around a planet or at one of the stable Lagrangean points like L₅. The cylinder is rotated along the long central axis to provide an effective spin gravity on the interior surface. Light is provided through mirror panels or interior fusion plasma generators. The typical interior is large enough to support a thriving biosphere and a comfortable population of several million.

Some orbital habitations were used as generation ships.

The hypothesis that biochemical compounds, primitive viruses, spores, or microorganisms from space are responsible for the origin of life on the Earth. The theory holds that these compounds or life forms are carried on meteors blasted free from the surface of distant planets.

directed panspermia is the idea that these precursors or early forms of life were deliberately spread by an intelligence, to seed compatible planets with similar forms of life. This could be used as a slow, large-scale mechanism for terraforming, to produce a large number of planets with compatible biologies and ecologies.

A weapon that uses a magnetic track to accelerate projectiles to high velocities. Inert projectiles (simple slugs) launched at these velocities carry sufficient energy to do significant damage to their targets. Smart projectiles launched at these velocities can be impossible to avoid.

An automaton that is created from electromechanical materials, typically to serve as labor in difficult, or dangerous environments. Robots differ from androids only in a superficial sense — robots are clearly mechanical beings, androids are built to resemble biological beings. Many robots have enough computational capacity to reach sentience.

A point where the curvature of space-time is infinite, a point where there is infinite density. The Big Bang posits a gravitational singularity at the start of time in this Universe. General relativity also predicts the existence of a singularity inside of black holes.

A sudden eruption of intense high-energy radiation from the surface layers of a star. A solar flare usually emits radiation across the entire spectrum, from radio waves, through the optical wavelengths, into X-rays and gamma rays. A solar flare can also eject large quantities of matter, in the form of electrons, protons, and even atomic nuclei.

An extruded or extended vane used to dissipate heat and other energies from a hyperspatial engine. The Sumner Flanges are crucial in dissipating the supercooled substances that tend to collect within a hyperfield. See Corrado Runaway.

A specialized First Contact team. TCT teams deal with understanding cultures long dead. They also deal with saving the works of doomed cultures that are not ready for contact. These may be pre-hyperdrive cultures that are doomed because of culture-ending disasters, natural and unnatural. These may be doomed cultures simply because of time or distance from the Coterie, where rescue efforts are simply impossible. The TCT does what it can to preserve the memories and treasures of these races.

An element heavier than uranium. (e.g. neptunium, plutonium) Most transuranic elements are not stable, radioactively decaying rapidly into other lighter elements. Because of this, these elements are not normally found in nature. While they can be produced in supernovae and other high-energy stellar processes, these elements decay too quickly to remain. They must be artificially manufactured through nuclear transmutation.

There are some superstable superheavy transuranic elements known. These elements (e.g. anslownium, hooverium) do not decay as quickly, which means that there are naturally existing sources. These sources are rare and usually represent miniscule amounts.

The programming inherent in a biological thinking unit, usually referring to a sentient biological being. Synonymous with liveware and meatware.

Wetware implants are cyborganic hardware and software systems that can be surgically placed into the neural network in order to augment the natural and normal wetware processing. They can provide additional memory or other specific mental processing skills.