=Immortality and the N-Body Problem= 
**Posted by:** Hohmann Kontakt, Sentinel <__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__>
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Ask a school kid on [[Mars]] to program you a simulation of Jupiter’s Trojans, and they’ll dutifully draw you up a big ellipse with the sun at its center, [[Jupiter]] at 90 degrees, and long, tapering blobs of asteroids scattered around the L4 and L5 points at 30 and 150 degrees. Long, tapering, static blobs. Thanks, Martian educational system! Our continued autonomy out rimward relies in part on your children sucking at orbital mechanics.
Now let’s get accurate.
Choose any of the million asteroids in the great swarms preceding and trailing Jupiter along its orbit. Call it a point mass, m0, among a cloud of hundreds of thousands of other point masses, m1–mn. Starting from where they are in three-dimensional space when you begin your calculation, and also taking into account linear momentum, angular momentum, and gravitational energy, calculate where each of those masses will be a year from now. Ten years from now. 100 years from now.
You can’t.
Oh, we’ve tried, and one gets some interesting results looking at the problem in a general way or for a few speciﬁc asteroids. But collisions, sometimes between two asteroids, sometimes between three or more, create mathematical singularities beyond which the results can’t be generalized. Asteroids librate, slowly changing positions relative to the stable centers of the L4 and L5 points. Sometimes they even form horseshoe orbits that move them, over hundreds of years, from the Trojans to the Greeks and back. Numbers become transcendent; integrating the bodies’ combined positions becomes impossible. A few of the weirder AGIs I’ve met claim to have seen the big picture; I say they are nuts. “Always in motion is the future. Difficult to predict.”
As with asteroids, so with transhumanity. Back in the age of mortality, a human body didn’t have much time to go beyond the calculable. Even on Mars today, a rather dull set of parameters constrains the differential equation yielding a transhuman ego’s fortunes in life, the integration of its position relative to other transhumans.
Out here in the Trojans, though, transhuman experience ﬂips the bird to the standard predictive models. We have a duration potentially as long as the asteroids themselves, as well as a tricksy capacity to avoid collisions that even those big, immortal space rocks lack. We dodge singularities. We trace tadpole orbits. We range beyond the calculable.
=Regions, Neighborhoods, and Local Cultures= 
First, a quick geography lesson (in case you got your schoolin’ on Mars). The swarm of asteroids preceding Jupiter in its orbit at the L4 point is the Greeks. Trailing Jupiter at the L5 point are the Trojans. The Martian school kid’s approximation of this set up gives you the basic shape of the swarms. Each spans about twenty-six degrees of Jupiter’s orbit, meaning that end to end, each swarm is almost two and a half times the distance from the [[Earth]] to the [[Sol|sun]] in length (2.3 AU) and a bit more than half the Earth-sun distance thick (.6 AU) at its center.
Despite the large area, the mass contained within each is only one ten-thousandth of an Earth mass—far less than the mass in the [[Main Belt]]. For all their richness in terms of supporting transhuman life, the Trojans are mostly empty.
Aside from librating around the L4 and L5 points, a lot of Trojan objects also have steep inclinations from the plane of the ecliptic. If you look at the plane of Jupiter’s orbit around the sun edge on and then make a cross section of it including both the L4 and L5 points, the swarms look like two pairs of parentheses enclosing the hyphen that is Jupiter’s orbit.
As I said earlier, the positions of individual asteroids over the long run (and even in the near term, in some cases) are hard to predict. However, inhabited Trojan objects, or at least those whose inhabitants don’t mind being found, all boast navigational beacons. A ship headed from the inner system to the Greeks might not know exactly where its destination rock will be when it gets there, but the ship can track the asteroid and burn mass to correct its course. By making themselves trackable, known settlements can form stable trade and cultural networks.
==Neighborhoods== 
Where settlements cluster close enough together that regular, physical commerce can take place and lag times are negligible for mesh communications, they’re said to comprise a neighborhood. The physical boundaries of a neighborhood are loosely deﬁned. Usually they’re blobs 250,000 to 2,000,000 kilometers across. In dense areas, neighborhoods may contain dozens of habitats, while in the dispersed areas at the edges of the asteroid swarms, a neighborhood might contain only a handful of stations. Qualities that may deﬁne neighborhoods are the languages most commonly spoken, the factions and sub-factions with the greatest representation among the population, and other aspects of culture.
The local cultures out here run the gamut. We have big anarcho-syndicalist mining co-ops with multi-species populations and as many languages among them as you’d ﬁnd spoken in a big Lunar city. We have autonomist transportation collectives whose stock in trade runs from passengers and small, precious cargoes up to entire asteroids. We have monolingual authenticist clades like you ﬁnd on Mars, [[Mercurials|mercurials]] of every political stripe, and even the occasional [[Ultimates|ultimates]] outpost.
Lurking on the fringes, we have some weird neighbors: brinker enclaves that keep completely to themselves and have any number of reasons for doing so, singularitarians and weird scientists doing their research far from where it can hurt anyone (or be discovered), and exhumans who’d just as soon eat you as look at you.
As much as these neighborhoods are bound together by microcultures, the real determiner of where settlements end up being built is as old as transhumanity: cold, hard physical resources.
==The Hildas== 
The Trojans and Greeks proper aren’t the only asteroids whose orbits are directly inﬂuenced by Jupiter. The Hildas, a group of about 1,100 asteroids, lay just inside of Jupiter’s orbit, locked in a 2:3 orbital resonance (meaning they circle the sun three times for every two orbits Jupiter and the Trojans complete). The Hildas are a lot like the Trojans: icy, rocky, sometimes carbonaceous, and poor in metals, but they’re much more sparsely inhabited. The main reason for this is that they’re harder to reach by ship. They’re not a swarm that’s coalesced around a stable gravitational point the way the Trojans are, making them costlier to reach in terms of fuel.
You hear lots of bogeyman stories about this or that asteroid in the Hildas, like the old chestnut that 153 Hilda, the asteroid after which the group is named, hosts a major base for exhuman pirates. A lot of these rumors are just loose talk, but there’s some sense to it. The Hildas are deﬁnitely a good place to set up shop if you want to be left alone.
=Icebergs, Big Rocks, and Lumps of Coal= 
The nested roulette wheels of stellar disc accretion and planet formation bestowed upon our reach of space a little bit of everything—except metals. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. Prospectors with luck and grit (usually both) do discover precious lodes of metals and other heavy elements out here from time to time. What the Trojans and Greeks do not want for are the other elements essential to transhuman sustenance and technology: water and other volatiles, carbon, and silicates.
==The Lagrangian Transport Network (LTN)== 
Not all of these delicious elements exist in every asteroid, and prospecting in some neighborhoods of the Trojans is difficult. Habs tend to spring up where the harvesting is good, but settling in the prime spots doesn’t always work out. The autonomists, one of the dominant cultures out here, hatched their own solution to this: the LTN.
Everyone knows about the ITN, the Interplanetary Transit Network (well, just about everyone; again I omit the poor, benighted school children of Mars). The ITN is a series of gravitationally determined pathways along which an object can travel through the solar system using very little energy. It’s slow, but it works. Add some energy to nudge between pathways, and it gets a lot faster.
The autonomists realized that despite the virtually unpredictable positions of Trojan objects within the L4 and L5 swarms, pathways similar to the ITN must exist within the Trojans. So they ran simulations to guestimate likely starting points for the hypothetical network. Then some autonomists who lived in richer regions of the swarms maneuvered a large number of resource-laden 500-meter asteroids to the hypothetical starting points, tagged them with transponders inviting anyone to mine them—provided the mining didn’t change the rocks’ trajectories—and turned them loose.
Not surprisingly, anarchists everywhere loved them for this. The architect of the project, an AGI from Locus named Outward (aka, “the anti-[[Comet Express|ComEx]]”) now has sufficient reputation to back just about any project they could dream up. It’ll take decades for Outward’s experiment to prove or disprove itself, but in the meantime, no one is complaining about thousands of tons of free resources drifting through their space.
So far, the twisting path followed by asteroids along the LTN conforms pretty closely to the predictions made by Outward and others on the project. Other autonomists have begun to contribute asteroids to the LTN pathways, and a few have even taken up residence on LTN objects. Every rock following the notional LTN sports a beacon, so provided Outward and company got at least a few of the starting points right, in about 150 years we’ll have a complete map of the pathways.
==Heavy Metal and Gravity== 
Metals are tougher to come by. A few asteroids containing heavy elements have been thrown into the LTN—almost too generous an act, if you want my opinion—but demand goes far beyond what that can provide. Beyond the occasional lucky prospector’s strike, most heavy elements arrive in the Trojans from the Main Belt via either Hohmann transfer orbits or the Interplanetary Transit Network. Luckily, Belters need water as badly as we need metal, so there’s a brisk trade in whole asteroids between the Main Belt and the Trojan swarms. “And to Mars, too?” one might ask. The answer is, “No, not so much.” Mars doesn’t have a lot that we want out here. Long-view preservationists have successfully made the case that trading iceteroids to Mars, just to have them splattered against the Martian ice caps for planetary warming, isn’t a sustainable move for transhumanity. Let the Martians look to the Kuiper Belt if they want to push ice.
It’s not obvious, but one thing the Trojans do have going for them is gravity. The [[Jovian Republic|Junta]] talk a lot about Jupiter’s slingshot potential as a local resource (one they defend like a complete pack of dickheads, by the way), but you don’t need a gigantic gravity well to beneﬁt from our solar system’s orbital dynamics. The Trojans and Greeks are a major waypoint on the aforementioned Interplanetary Transit Network, and this means a lot of long haul commerce comes through our space. Icepushers from the Kuipers, iron/nickel asteroids making their way even farther out system, and other bulk goods that have to move by ship all transfer via the Trojans to avoid paying a tithe to the Junta.
Unfortunately, this also creates a motive for the Jovians and the inner system powers to occasionally attempt a land grab. The Jovians don’t like trade circumventing them. The hypercorps believe that once they put boosters on an asteroid or comet, they own it. Unfortunately for the corporate sphere’s precious notions about property, autonomists regularly organize whaling parties—ﬂash mobs that mine an asteroid as it passes through our space without stopping it on its trajectory. The asteroid arrives at its destination, but it arrives a bit light. Hypercorps think this is theft. Well, fuck them. They’ve stolen entire planets.
We’ve had two real wars in the Trojans, and both resulted from the [[Planetary Consortium|Consortium]] and the Jovians trying to make territorial claims out here. To their credit, the [[Titanian Commonwealth|Titanians]] have never tried to do the same—but they got involved in the second conﬂict, and now they won’t leave. More on that later.
=Operating in the Trojans= 
Planetary Consortium Oversight’s brieﬁng manual for agents coming out here (yeah, I have a copy, don’t you?) tells us, “The Jovian L4 and L5 swarms present a challenging theater of operations for covert mission deployments.” What they mean is that outside of the big settlements like [[Locus]], sneaking up on anyone in the Trojans is difficult at best. You can mask a ship’s presence on radar to some degree, but hiding a ship from other sensors, especially masking its infrared emissions, is almost impossible. There’s so much space between Jovian objects that it’s rare to ﬁnd an approach path to a hab or asteroid that doesn’t involve crossing tens of thousands of kilometers of cold, empty space.
Gaining access to places you’re not meant to visit is often a matter of clever hacking and social engineering. I’ve gotten aboard target habs by replacing someone who was expected to egocast there and taking their intended morph, stowing away aboard a station’s autonomous harvester drones when they went out for groceries, and spooﬁng the credentials of a ship that was expected to dock. Showing up in a ship capable of resurfacing its hull to foil visual inspection works well, too.
Once you have one team member in, it can turn into a waiting game. I once spent a week aboard an exhuman pirate station pretending to be someone called Gristleyknock (exhumans of the predator variety: bad at names). It involved a lot of growling. And offal. I hate offal. Eventually, I found a window of time during which I could accept egocasts of my team and sleeve them in an unguarded med bay. Granted, I’ve seen a few feats of ingenuity and some downright crazy stunts result in successful physical inﬁltrations of isolated habitats. Firewall’s raid on the //Song Cai Flower// aboard the autonomist courier //Kesyrah//—a ship equipped with powerful cold gas thrusters—is one example. In that case, though, the space station’s occupants were crazed exsurgents barely capable of operating their own sensor systems.
Another Firewall team successfully executed a maneuver that was ﬁrst attempted (unsuccessfully) by the ultimates in their conﬂict with the exhumans over the [[Discord Gate]]. They found a rock that would pass near their insertion point, hid their ship there, and then jumped. Yes: jumped. They gave themselves a push with gas packs, put themselves in medical stasis, and then spent two weeks freefalling at their target. They didn’t miss the target, didn’t get spotted and shot (the ultimates’ fail point when they tried the same), and revived successfully in time to slow themselves down and land on the hull of the target hab. I do not recommend trying it at home.
Another major operational hazard out this-a-way is that trips to isolated habs are often a one-way ticket. It’s hard to scrub a mission out here if things go wrong—so don’t. In the Trojans, failure is ﬁnal, at least for the present instance of your ego.
=Trojan Habitat Types= 
[[Beehives]] and [[Clusters|clusters]] far outnumber other habitat types in the Trojans. Beehives are an obvious choice with so many asteroids around, but why build clusters instead of cylinders? The reason is that heavy metals are scarce out here. For the amount of metal needed to construct one [[O'Neill Cylinders|O’Neill cylinder]], you can build a dozen cluster habs with the same amount of usable space. This is because to withstand the forces continually pushing them outward, the hull of a rotating cylinder needs to be much thicker than modules in a cluster hab. At the same time, the Trojans don’t live under the same threat of massive irradiation that habs in Jupiter’s orbit do, so a great deal less shielding is called for.
Hab designers who need gravity either resort to small, purpose-built rotating modules within a larger cluster hab, or they go with ring or disc designs. You still don’t get a sky and natural weather this way, but hey, that’s what AR is for.
If you’re looking for novelty in hab (and ship) designs, the Trojans are a buffet. People will try anything once, even if it means they then have to live in a ﬂawed dwelling for a while. I’ve seen matrioshka habs comprising a series of nested spherical shells, clusters that were little more than well-insulated pressure tents, tiny habs made up of tin cans connected to huge arrays designed to collect power from starlight (talk about your ultimate in sustainability), and many riffs (successful to varying degrees) on the organism-like nanofabrication employed by Hamilton cylinders.
The only thing I haven’t seen is another [[MeatHab]], and you know: that’s ﬁne. The solar system only needs one.
* [[Nuestro Shells| Nuestro Shells]]
=Habitats in the Trojans= 
* [[Locus]]
* [[C Squat]]
* [[Casa Arturo]]
* [[Catal Hayuk]]
* [[Exarchia]]
* [[Intruder]]
* [[Kropotkin]] (Non-canon)
* [[Lot 49]]
* [[Respect]]
* [[Turing]]
* [[Winter]]

=Movements and Clades= 
Anarchist social models prevail in the Trojans, but there’s a lot of room within them for diverging views.
==Exoglots== 
No one is sure what to make of the exoglots. Their weird, insectoid bodies are roughly bipedal, but with an extra set of limbs above their waists that are jointed so that an exoglot can fold itself in half in either direction. All of their limbs are strong, spindly, and clawed. Their heads resemble nothing so much as that of a huge, black ﬂy. Are they an exhuman faction, a cult, or just a really strange transhuman clade? Their intentions, how they recruit new members, and whether they have any internal organization are unknown.
A sizable hive of exoglots inhabits a series of modules anchored along Locus’s Foucault Spar. They follow all of the usual customs regarding citizenship scrupulously, supplying a fair share of public atmosphere along the spar to which they’re docked and adhering to community standards regarding module architecture, production of angular momentum, clearance between modules, and the like.
That said, many of their neighbors are uneasy with them. Locus tolerates them as it tolerates nearly everyone, but other habitats ﬂat out prevent them from docking or taking up residency. Their disturbing appearance and the fact that the never-decoded artiﬁcial language they use among themselves sounds worryingly like recordings of TITAN headhunter drones no doubt factor in.
The biggest problem with the exoglots is their refusal to communicate with other transhumans in any way unless absolutely vital. They habitually stealth all personal network signals, appear to use only heavily encrypted VPNs to communicate, and on the rare occasions they do communicate, do so only in terse text messages.
A few things are known. The exoglots existed prior to the Fall; this is documented. They’re not synths, but probably pods; they consume organic feedstock and atmosphere just like anyone else. The only time they’ve ever been violent is when their modules were invaded. They have no known ties to any criminal activity. And they design stunningly beautiful self-modifying nanosculptures, all of which are three-dimensional projections of four-dimensional objects such as tesseracts. Trade in these objects is their primary source of rep and credit.
But what are they doing? Are they idiot savants who’ve cloistered themselves against a confusing universe, or are they exhumans incubating in the midst of their eventual prey? Benedetta Katzenellenbogen is the only transhuman known to have been inside of their hives at Locus. The exoglots wished to consult with her on a building project, but she refuses to speak of what she saw inside.
==Lizards== 
The lizards are vacuum dwellers. Sleeved in either synths or sealed biomorphs, they make their way as miners and harvesters dwelling in open space. Their ships are usually little more than open trusses with engines attached to them. When they visit a hab, they rarely come inside, instead clinging to the station’s outer skin and deploying starlight focusers to bask in stellar energy.
==Long-View Preservationists== 
What do you need environmentalism for in a cloud of barren asteroids ﬁve AU from Sol? If you think in decades, you don’t. Maybe not even if you think in terms of the next few centuries; there are a lot of rocks out here. But those who’ve chosen to think in geological time are not as common as one might expect. If transhumans need no longer die, then ensuring that the solar system remains a sustainable environment over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years makes sense. Long-view preservationists regularly weigh in on issues like gas giant mining, asteroid mining, and transhuman expansion onto exoplanets. The math they use to back up their arguments is crazy—but then, old Earth environmentalists sounded crazy to some people, too. And they turned out to be right.
=Crime in the Trojans= 
It’s a given that gardens come with snakes, and ours is no exception. What constitutes crime in the Trojans, however, is a very different matter from elsewhere.
==Carbon Reavers== 
Subsistence asteroid harvesting is a rough way of life, and pirates who jump miners for their goods make it even harder. Its easier to wait until someone else has broken part of an asteroid down and rob them while they’re shuttling the ice, other volatiles, and carbons to their hab than to mine it yourself. Carbon reaver gangs do exactly that. Fortunately, carbon reavers aren’t usually much better equipped for combat than their prey. They’re desperadoes, and a well organized local militia can usually make short work of them. Usually. Unfortunately, more of these gangs keep popping up. Dealing with them is steady work for security freelancers.
==Ego Theft== 
Gangs like the [[Intelligent Design Crew|ID Crew]] and smaller copycats are very active rimward. Smaller egocasting facilities and lots of places to hide mean that they’re a constant nuisance. Luckily, identity thieves are universally reviled out here, and any rumor that they’re operating draws a strong response from the infosec community. Firewall agents be warned, though: this cuts both ways. Intercepting egocasts, hacking backups, and the like will destroy your rep if you’re caught and may even draw a response from vigilantes unless you can publicly prove you were in the right.
==IP Enforcement== 
The Planetary Consortium just doesn’t know when to give up sometimes. Oversight and several corporations have been known to mount punitive strikes against pirates they believe are violating their intellectual property rights in the outer system. Sometimes the strikes are carried out by actual hypercorp agents, other times they put out hits through the Guanxi network or hire the [[ultimates]]. Hits are most often called on pirates who’ve transferred Consortium fabber blueprints back to fabber gangs on Mars and elsewhere sunward. IP Enforcement strikes often involve a lot of collateral damage, with little regard for bystanders.

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