**Posted by:** Adam Mooljee, Firewall Sentinel <__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__>
Few people are ever going to travel this far out; there’s not much reason to, and the options for getting here are either an expensive egocast or a remarkably long journey by spaceship. Out here, you’re also seriously out of touch. News from the inner system takes four hours to reach Neptune by light speed. If you want to keep up-to-date, be prepared to burn some serious qubits while you’re here. Other than the occasional extreme tourist or researcher, there are three major reasons people visit Neptune: [[Glitch]], [[Ilmarinen]], and [[Mahogany]]. In a more general sense, almost everyone comes to Neptune for one of two reasons: to hide or to join or start a community of people (to use this term in a particularly broad sense) who are exploring the limits of sapient existence. Both [[Uranus]] and [[Eris]] have [[Pandora gates|gates]], Neptune doesn’t and so is rarely visited by anyone who isn’t considering immigrating there.
=Hiding= 
There is a lot of laying low going on this far out, but there are many different reasons behind it. Despite various vids telling stories of desperate fugitives egocasting or taking a ship to the edges of the system, most people who simply want to avoid pursuit ﬁnd a convenient [[scum]] barge or a place in the [[Main Belt|Belt]], the [[Jovian Trojans]], or [[Saturn]] to hole up in. One of the big advantages of not going too far out is that there are a lot of people and habs to vanish in and so tracking someone down is hard.
Less than 100,000 people inhabit the region around Neptune, compared to the millions in the Belt, so vanishing is much more difﬁcult. Instead, what you have out here are people determined to reinvent themselves and to get away from everyone and everything that might either recognize them or remind them of their past. That’s a fairly unusual subset of people. It is far more likely to consist of people running from themselves than fugitives ﬂeeing from justice or rivals.
There’s the other sort of hiding, of course: people bunkering down out of concern over potential or imagined threats. The survivalist meme is surprisingly popular out here. Neptune and its Trojans are a popular destination for brinkers. You’re far out on the black emptiness, and there’s no gate around for TITANs or alien invaders to come pouring out of. I’ve heard all manner of crazy stories from people here about how the [[Planetary Consortium]], the [[Titanian Commonwealth]], or even the [[anarchists|anarchists ]]are secretly run by TITANs. Most of these people either expect some sort of trouble to come from the gates or continued work on AGIs, while others simply have never gotten over the trauma of the Fall and can’t believe the TITANs aren’t waiting somewhere to ﬁnish the job. I’d love to be able to say all of them are wrong and crazy, but none of us can, and so maybe they’ll still be around long after everyone else has suffered some hideous fate. Paranoia and conspiracy theories are practically a hobby around Neptune, especially among the brinkers.
=Gate Rumours= 
Since there are Pandora gates around Saturn, Uranus, and Eris, there are more than a few people living around Neptune who wonder if there isn’t one here too. Performing an organized, thorough, and relatively fast search of the various moons would take more funds and organization than anyone out here can muster, but there is no shortage of desultory gate prospectors and more than a few rumors of gates or buried anomalies that might be gates. [[Triton]], with its cryovolcanoes and occasional seismic activity, is the most common site for such tales. Every month or two, someone attempts to confirm a possible discovery there. Since none of the other Pandora gates have been found on a planet’s largest moon, however, most people speculate that if one exists it will be found on one of the other seven inner moons, with most bets on either Nereid or Proteus. Except for Triton, though, all of these moons are small enough that it is likely a surveyor would have found any such gates by now. It’s always possible that there’s a gate buried too deep to easily spot, but efforts to find one are built more on hope than rational expectation. Some Neptunians hope eagerly that one is found, since it would make the planetary system far more prosperous and influential. Of course, not everyone wants that to happen. The brinkers don’t want to attract too much attention and some of the more radical [[mercurials]] want to be left alone to pursue their own strange destinies without interference from outsiders. Naturally, there are some locals who believe that a gate has been discovered, but that its existence was covered up. Until I see evidence to the contrary, however, I’m betting that there isn’t one around Neptune.
=Neptunian Aerostats= 
Unlike the folks lurking out in the Oort Cloud or the various dwarf planets like [[Pluto]] or [[Eris]], Neptune and its moons has an abundance of resources of all sorts—and there is also a gas giant to hide in. Ever since [[Morningstar Constellation|Morningstar]] declared [[Venus|Venusian]] independence, far too many people are crazy about [[aerostats]]. Now we have a couple here, in what’s perhaps one of the craziest places to consider them. Neptune’s atmosphere is the most dangerous of the gas giants, with massive dynamic storm systems and raging wind speeds that can exceed 2,000 kph—that’s nearly supersonic. It’s an impressive feat that any aerostats have survived here at all. Of course, the people living here actually have a good reason for building them.
* [[Mushroom]]
* [[Jaques]]
=Neptunian Orbit= 
**Posted by:** Raisa Geld, Firewall Sentinel <__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__>
The presence of both Glitch and Mahogany have made Neptune a magnet for the more exotic mercurials, as well as for others who seek to go well beyond the boundaries of ordinary transhumanity.
* [[Glitch]]
* [[Mahogany]]
=Neptunian Moons= 
**Posted by:** Adam Mooljee, Firewall Sentinel <__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__>
Neptune has thirteen moons, four of which orbit within the ice giant’s thin ring system. Most of these are only sparsely inhabited.
* [[Triton]]
* [[Proteus]]
===Sidebar: The Larissa Tracks Controversy=== 
A few months ago, controversy erupted when a lone brinker, surveying for a Pandora gate, claimed to ﬁnd evidence of alien visitation on Neptune’s moon Larissa. According to the documentation, the brinker found scorch marks, nonhuman footprints, and other signs of a landing etched into the cold regolith. What might have been passed off as the signs of another brinker’s passage at a quick glance, however, showed clear signs that they were much, much older: hundreds of thousands of years. Researchers from Ilmarinen visited the site and took their own readings. Though their results were not entirely conclusive, they do seem to verify the age of the tracks and marks as being placed before the evolution of humans. Naysayers abound, of course, with many claiming that the entire thing is an elaborate hoax set up by brinkers with too much time on their hands. Tourists have already been making pilgrimages to the site, despite concerns about contamination of archeological evidence. The site has also drawn even more explorers to Larissa, hoping to ﬁnd other signs or even alien relics stashed away somewhere on or within the cold, icy moon.
=The Neptunian Trojans= 
**Posted by:** Adam Mooljee, Firewall Sentinel <__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__>
Most people don’t realize that the Neptunian Trojans outnumber the asteroids in the [[Jovian Trojans]] by an order of magnitude. While a lot of these are just clumps of dirt and ice no more than 10 klicks in diameter, there are fewer small asteroids here, as they fragment into dust more easily. The amount of asteroids over 100 kilometers in diameter is signiﬁcant. What this means is that the Neptunian Trojans are big but sparsely populated neighborhoods. In other words, the perfect place to hide out. Most of the habitats out here are small [[Tin Can Habitats|tins]] and [[beehives]] full of brinkers and other eccentrics. It’s uncommon to ﬁnd one with more than 500 inhabitants, and most have less than 100.
* [[Hawking]]
* [[Ilmarinen]]
===Sidebar: Secret Shipyard=== 
**To:** <encrypted>
**From:** Adam Mooljee, Firewall Sentinel
I’ll send an image when I get one, but I thought I’d make a report ﬁrst. I was talking with a group of neoprimitives who want to build their own faux Eden out on one of the rocks in Neptune’s L4 point. They sent out a swarm of small autonomous mapping probes to do their own survey of the asteroids they had in mind because they don’t trust the ofﬁcial data. One of their people said that they found something odd on one of those bodies there, something that doesn’t match up with any known records. They want to sell the info and thought I might be a likely buyer.
My informant, a woman named Chylie, showed me the image, but only after I disabled all my recording methods—these neo-prims are a seriously secretive bunch, but you see that a lot out here. I saw a single frame of a deep crevice in one of the smaller asteroids, a body only around 30 or 40 kilometers in diameter. The probe’s angle was such that it recorded a partial image of the bottom of the crevice. It revealed what looked like a single huge ship. I couldn’t tell without data analysis, but it looked like a high-speed transport of some kind, probably over a kilometer long. I saw some parts that looked like an antimatter drive, but there were a number of engine components that I didn’t recognize. The edges of the crevice were in the way at various points. The ship also had the look of being under construction or going through heavy maintenance.
The problem is that the probes the neo-prims used were pretty old and they only managed to get a few useful shots with telescopic lenses. They didn’t show me the others, but they claim they show evidence of half a dozen of these ships, all similar. Chylie said that a later probe got a partial image of the same crevice 14 hours later and it showed up as less deep and empty of any ships. Whoever’s building this thing presumably got it back under hiding.
My guess? Either someone’s playing with experimental drives or someone’s building a ﬂeet for interstellar travel. Why they’re hiding it out here is anyone’s guess—but it bears looking into. I hope the neo-prims actually have hard data on the rock’s identity, some of those old probes have larger error bars on their location ﬁgures and there are more than 100 bodies at Neptune’s L4 that match this asteroid’s specs.
===Sidebar: The Brinker War=== 
Brinkers are not exactly a homogenous group, and many of them have competing or even hostile ideologies. They sometimes clash over mining and homesteading claims, deals gone sour, or even unfortunate romantic liaisons. Sometimes, they even go to war.
The “brinker war” currently ongoing in Neptune’s L5 Trojans began when an asteroid with a small [[Tin Can Habitats|tin can hab]] module owned by an extended family of Malaysian sikhs crossed into the territorial range claimed by a bunker of Canadian survivalists. The survivalists claim they issued several warnings and fired several warning shots, but the sikhs, who couldn’t really control the asteroid’s trajectory, say the former Canadians simply lobbed a missile over and destroyed the hab. The family responded by seizing a nearby automated mining outpost used by the survivalists, and it went escalated from there. Several small habs and a few dozen deaths later, the rivals are now engaged in full-blown hostilities. The main stations of both are equally well armed and dug in, so the strife has settled to periodic waves of drone and missile strikes that are downed before they inﬂict too much damage. Both enemies have also been shooting down attempts by the other side to re-supply, leading to chronic shortages. The sikhs are allegedly attempting to hire some [[ultimates]] to resolve the conﬂict, but others in the region believe that the survivalists have a few secret weapons they haven’t quite grown desperate enough to use.

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