=Bluewood= 
Bluewood is notable as one of the few true Earth-like worlds discovered so far. It is also one of the ﬁrst to be colonized by autonomists via the [[Fissure Gate]].
Named for the vast expanse of blue forest that covers its land masses, Bluewood is both fascinating and potentially dangerous. The flora and fauna exhibit properties that have not been found anywhere else, leaving some to believe Bluewood’s life was manufactured—or at least modiﬁed—by unknown entities. The manner in which the forest has overwhelmed transhuman colonies and penetrated information networks is alarming. So far, the forest seems harmless, but not everyone is convinced that it will remain so indeﬁnitely.
||>   ||= **Bluewood** ||
||> **Type** ||= Terrestrial (Earth-like) ||
||> **Primary Star/Satelite of** ||= G1V (Yellow dwarf) ||
||> **Gravity** ||= 1.04g ||
||> **Diameter** ||= 15,300 km ||
||> **Atmospheric Pressure** ||= 1.02 atm ||
||> **Atmospheric Composition** ||= Nitrogen (75%), Oxygen (22%) ||
||> **Surface Temperature (Min/Mean/Max)** ||= -90 C/14C/55C ||
||> **Day Length** ||= 21 hours ||
||> **Orbital Period** ||= 411 days ||
||> **Satellites** ||= None ||
||> **Gate Access** ||= Fissure Gate ||
==Firewall Mission Report 319947D== 
**Operative:** Slider Zone
The ﬁrst thing you notice when you look at a map of Bluewood is the forest, which is also the ﬁrst thing you see when you exit the gate. Water covers 60% of the planet and all but 9% of the land area is part of a single equatorial supercontinent. Almost the entirety of this supercontinent that is not mountainous or desert is covered by a vast contiguous forest, carpeting ~60% of the land mass and visible on orbital maps as a solid and uniform slate blue. This forest is composed of trees with large lapis-colored leaves and thick, pale, slate-blue trunks that range from 3 to 5 meters in diameter and 8 to 20 meters high. Some of the biologists I’ve talked to refer to these plants as separate trees, but others say that they aren’t. The roots of these trees all connect to those of nearby trees. I’m told that the vast forest most closely resembles a huge and woody rhizome.
It’s worth pointing out that blue is an uncommon color in terms of plant life. When it comes to converting sunlight to energy through photosynthesis, the blue wavelengths of light provide some of the best energy conversion ratios. In terms of growth, plants that absorb blue light have an evolutionary advantage over plants that reﬂect it (as blue leaves do). Nevertheless, blue has come to predominate Bluewood ﬂora.
===Harmonious Ecosystem===
The bluetrees, as the locals call them, form the basis for the entire land-based ecosystem. There are a variety of ﬂying and arboreal life forms that live on and in these trees and other creatures that live on the ground beneath them. Some of these animals drink sap from special pockets on the trees; others devour fruit, dead wood, or fallen leaves. Several years of careful observation have determined that none of these life forms live off the live trees themselves or even so much as damage them. Even the insects do no harm to living trees. More surprisingly, none of the life forms attack or feed directly off each other. The entire dynamic of predator and prey is absent on Bluewood. The few carnivores, for example, are scavengers that feed only on corpses. There are parasites that live on the trees and on various animals, but they do no harm to their hosts. The only time one being on Bluewood eats another is if the prey has died by accident or natural causes.
As some of the more spiritually-inclined colonists repeatedly point out, the entire ecosystem lives in harmony. Biologists have noted that this harmony seems speciﬁcally designed to beneﬁt the bluetrees. Animals that eat dead wood rid the forest of dead trees and cut away portions of bluetrees that have died without harming the rest. Other animals eat the trees’ turquoise fruit, either carrying the seeds or defecating them in locations where bluetrees have recently died, thus spurring regrowth. There are a wide variety of complex chemicals in bluetree sap and fruit and there is some speculation among astrobiologists that the bluetrees may communicate with or control the animals that feed off of these compounds.
===The Defended Forest===
Despite the lack of predators and the unusual ecosystem of peaceful co-existence, the forest’s harmony vanishes if the bluetrees are threatened or harmed. Biologists ﬁrst observed this behavior when explorers cut down trees and researchers took core samples for study. Small squirrel-like creatures, normally passive and serene, swarmed and bit those harming the trees. Avian creatures swooped down to peck and claw at the aggressors. Digging animals attacked with their large, sharp claws. These animals were clearly unintelligent creatures with no grasp of tactics, but they were exceedingly persistent and clearly acting to defend the bluetrees. Thankfully, they ceased attacking as soon as the trees were no longer in imminent danger.
Initially, several explorers and researchers were injured by creatures defending these trees. The colonists have since learned that if they need to obtain samples, clear a path, or otherwise trim or cut a tree, to use small and durable robots, like a dwarf or a servitor. The locals make certain that visitors know collecting dead wood or even breaking off dead sections of living trees is ﬁne. However, otherwise harming a bluetree may be putting yourself in danger. 
In contrast to the animals’ defense of the bluetrees, attacking any of the local animals directly causes them to ﬂee. Most ﬁght back if cornered, but others of their kind do not join in the attack. Having no local predators, most Bluewood creatures are not skittish or shy of transhumans and will not automatically ﬂee. Sometimes they exhibit curiosity, following or landing/climbing on visitors to watch what they are doing.
Current research has not yet revealed why a world without predators would evolve such unusual responses. Several of the biologists I talked to believe that bluetrees and the ecology of this planet are an artiﬁcial creation or were at least modiﬁed and guided in their development. As further evidence towards this, many animals exhibit behaviors that can only be interpreted as cultivating bluetree growth. For example, some creatures disassemble fallen trees and clear the way for new bluetrees to grow.
===Study and Colonization===
Initially, Bluewood was a biologist’s dream as well as an obvious choice for limited colonization. Bluewood’s ecosystem is very different from anything found on Earth, but as long as visitors avoid directly harming the trees, the bluetree forest was exceedingly safe and easy to study. Bluewood is devoid of predators, the air and water are both acceptable to transhumans, and the waters are free of all hostile life, including dangerous microbes.
Biologists set up the ﬁrst botanical research station ﬁve years ago. A year after that, a group of 8,000 autonomists from across the outer system answered the call put forth by a Love and Rage colonization initiative to determine the potential long-term habitability of Bluewood. Within two years, the population of Bluewood had grown to 10,000, including several hundred biologists. Naturally, the biologists strongly advised against cutting down or damaging any bluetrees to construct the colony. Instead, both the colony and the three research stations were constructed just outside the edge of the forest, where the ecology was far simpler. 
Swelling the ranks of the anarchists and autonomists here are a large number of idealists attracted to a planet where the entire ecosystem is based on harmony and cooperation. A signiﬁcant percentage of the colonists are paciﬁsts committed to non-violence who hope to emulate Bluewood’s cooperative ecosystem. These include several spiritual and religious sects, from neobuddhists and techno-creationists to pantheistic neopagans. Though dedicated to a harmonious lifestyle, it would be a mistake to consider these colonies vulnerable to aggression. They retain weapon templates in their cornucopia machines and, with some exceptions, are likely to ﬁght for survival if threatened.
Today, the Bluewood colony consists of a pair of settlements 15 kilometers apart. The original settlement, Arborea, is home to approximately 6,000 transhumans and is located on the western edge of the bluetree forest, less than 50 kilometers from the Bluewood Gate. The second settlement, Harmony, was founded 2 years after Arborea, approximately 150 kilometers south and west, and sits less than a kilometer from the continent’s coast, 15 kilometers from the edge of the forest. It is currently home to approximately 3,000 transhumans.
===Arboreal Invasion===
Within a year of the founding of Arborea and the various biological research stations, the scientists and the colonists here discovered just how invasive the bluetrees could be. Despite being located atop a ridge clear of bluetrees and some distance from the forest edge, the original settlement was soon surrounded by bluetree saplings that invaded between buildings and other structures. These saplings grew rapidly, and an extension of new growth soon connected this pocket to the larger forest. Outlying research stations experienced a similar encroachment. Any structure erected within 3 kilometers of the forest soon found itself overgrown.
The bluetrees growing around settlements tend to literally encompass buildings, with limbs growing right along the surface and intertwining with branches from other bluetrees. The growth avoids moving parts like doors or mobile sensor arrays that move at least once every few days, but everything else is encased in web-like patterns of slate blue branches. The structures located closest to the forest are now largely encased in wood. So far, the bluetrees have not entered closed structures, nor do they block regularly-traveled thoroughfares.
The bluetrees inﬂict no damage or pressure on any of the structures they grow on and around, but they are impossible to dislodge. Though the colonists have refrained from any large-scale efforts to uproot, poison, or destroy the overgrowth, all attempts to cut back the branches has encouraged growth and provoked attacks from Bluewood’s native wildlife. A month or two after cutting a portion of a structure free from its covering, the area is once again covered by a network of branches. Even nanotech bio-defense units have had limited effect in deterring bluetree growth.
The settlement of Harmony, far enough from the forest to remain undisturbed, is a haven for colonists worried about the long-term prospects of living in the bluetrees’ embrace. Its population swelled as over a third of Arborea’s residents relocated. The remainder of Arborea’s inhabitants and the researchers in the science stations have adjusted to living in environments surrounded by and penetrated by bluetrees. These residents remain largely unconcerned and do not consider the trees to be harmful to themselves or their buildings. Opinions differ in Harmony, however, where many inhabitants fear the bluetree activity is in some way dangerous.
===Electrical Abnormalities===
The unusual encroachment of the bluetrees on transhuman settlements isn’t the only anomaly to be reported on Bluewood. In Arborea and similar bluetree-infested outposts, a demonstrable drain on active power sources has been recorded. Evidence indicates that this energy is in fact drawn off by the bluetrees themselves. On wired power systems, the current drain measures up to 4%, presumably leeched away by some form of near-ﬁeld siphoning. For wireless energy transfer systems, the power loss can be as high as 10%, believed to be drawn away by some form of biological resonance coils in the bluetree limbs. It is not known what use the bluetree electrochemical metabolism has for this power, though researchers assume the power is distributed throughout their root system. There is some evidence to indicate that this energy drain may fuel growth and repair of injuries, as the bluetrees invading transhuman structures seem to both grow and heal at faster rates.
A similar drain on wireless mesh networks has also been reported, with an unusually high rate of data loss occurring on data transfers in bluetree-enveloped areas. A slight but measurable interference effect on wireless communications originates from the bluetrees, though the exact mechanism behind this remains unknown. Even more oddly, there is an equally high rate of data artifacts appearing on these mesh networks. Analysis of these artifacts indicates that they may be a side effect of the interference, elements of data noise injected into data transfers and communication links. If that’s the case, then there’s a major mystery in how these interference effects mimic mesh protocols enough to inject data and why standard ﬁlters don’t process the noise out.
These discoveries have led to speculation that the bluetrees are actively monitoring transhuman mesh activity and may even somehow be working to inﬁltrate local mesh networks. Though there is little direct evidence to back up this claim, research into bluetree biology has found protein ﬁlaments that function as microbial nanowires with extremely complex patterns of electrical currents. These ﬁlaments connect different trees together and along with other electrochemical interactions suggest that there may be some sort of data transfer from one tree to another.
===Other Anomalies===
The bluetrees grow so densely in signiﬁcant parts of the continent that the forest is effectively impassable. Some of these areas have been explored with microbots and nanoswarms, revealing a thick lattice of woodwork teeming with life. Bluewood astrobiologists estimate that they have so far cataloged less than 1% of the planet’s species.
The mysterious off-limits interior and abundance of seemingly-modiﬁed alien life have spurred numerous tall tales and rumors. A common story spread among colonists tells of wood-lined tunnels offering passageway deep into the forest’s heart. Others tell of desperate hypercorp missions sent to investigate artifacts buried behind a fortress of living wood. Still others talk of the intelligence that crafted Bluewood’s ﬂora and fauna and how it still remains active, lurking in the forest depths, tweaking its creations and adapting new life forms to the planet’s ever-changing conditions. Those who believe in this latter rumor fear that the transhuman presence may one day be viewed as too invasive or destructive and that the forest will be redesigned to wipe the colonists out. Needless to say, there is no evidence backing any of these tales or claims. Nevertheless, these rumors are popular, particularly in Harmony, where a defensive mindset is setting in among the settlers. This paranoia is even extending towards the residents of Arborea, whom some Harmonistas believe to be growing increasingly “off” and somehow affected by the bluetrees.

[ [[Home]] | [[Setting Information]] | [[Gatecrashing Ops]] | [[Places of Interest]] | [[Extrasolar Systems]] ]