=Pan= 
**Posted by:** Roberto Alverez, Firewall Proxy <__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__>
Pan is the innermost of [[Saturn|Saturn’s]] moons. It has an irregular walnut shape and is approximately 34 x 31 x 21 kilometers. It is uninhabited apart from the iZulu colony.
==iZulu== 
**Station Type:** [[Beehives|Beehive]]
**Allegiance:** Autonomist Alliance ([[Extropians|Extropian]])
**Primary Languages:** Afrikaans, English, Xhosa, Zulu
**Population:** 1,100,000
iZulu was built by anarcho-capitalist South African technocrats who managed to escape the Fall, in the process bringing along more than two million infomorph refugees from Sub-Saharan Africa. Those infugees with the right mix of contacts and skills received bodies and are doing well on iZulu. Skilled refugees who were also lucky were not physically re-instantiated, but are now active as infomorphs in the iZulu mesh. The rest remain in dead storage, waiting for someone to retrieve them. Many of these frozen egos were adapted to living conditions and technology that were at best ﬁfty years behind the times when the Fall hit, meaning that they may have difﬁculty coping with transhuman society without a sponsor willing to help them adapt and acquire new skills training. iZulu is essentially two colonies. The ﬁrst and most obvious is the physical habitat, the second is the virtual colony inhabiting the mesh.
===The Embodied World=== 
The iZulu habitat population is, in total, less prosperous than most habitats around Saturn. On the other hand, iZulu is also home to some of the wealthiest people in the outer system, indicating a large economic disparity between the classes. With a huge population of active infomorphs clamoring to be re-instantiated, the embodied residents are quite aware that they are a single serious mistake away from losing their morph and rejoining the digital masses. Make no mistake, this can be an exceptionally brutal hab. Here, ﬁnancial success is considered both a mark of luck and a sign of moral virtue. When someone runs into ﬁnancial trouble, many of their allies and friends desert them as they seek to isolate themselves from any sources of failure and disgrace. If you’re doing well, however, this can be a fairly sweet place to live, with the luxury areas of the habitat putting even the most decadent [[Venus|Venusian]] [[aerostats]] to shame. Sure, it’s crowded, but you’ve got access to all the latest goods and sufﬁcient raw materials to fab up anything you can ﬁt in your hab module, as long as you don’t think about how the rest of the population is struggling to get by.
One of the most serious problems here is the belief that family comes ﬁrst. Most locals are ﬁercely loyal to their families and closest friends, but everyone else is considered fair game. Screwing a rival, even to the point where they lose everything, even to the point of being placed back into cold storage, is considered acceptable. If you’re not related by blood or marriage, many people will do what they can to rip you off at the ﬁrst opportunity. In their view, they owe you absolutely nothing beyond the very minimum the law requires, which basically simply boils down to not destroying or stealing each other’s property—at least, not blatantly. This competitive, no-holds-barred ethos results in numerous blood feuds and occasional violence. Many of the private courts that settle legal disputes are notoriously biased and corrupt; it pays to read your contracts carefully, have friends in high places, and make judicious bribes.
Another of the major complaints made by the lower classes here is the high degree of discrimination based on ethnic and national ties. The South Africans largely run the show here, speciﬁcally the Zulu and Xhosa families who were able to escape the Fall with a large amount of their wealth intact and found iZulu. Because of this, a small number of families have a stranglehold on the upper echelons, meaning that anyone from other tribes or nationalities is a whole lot less likely to have a morph or to have a crappy case and not much else. Inter-ethnic tensions run hot here and occasionally ﬂare into violence. The security contractors tend to be dominated by speciﬁc ethnic groups, meaning that they often instigate the cycle of violence. These sorts of tensions seem exceptionally archaic to most outsiders, but the local power structure and the desperation of the poor keeps this nonsense from fading away.
===The iZulu Mesh=== 
The iZulu mesh is home to 700,000 active infomorphs, almost twice the embodied population. A vast simulspace environment has been established for them to dwell in. Virtual Africa is a hyper-real vision of what a fully modern Africa might be like. It’s a wonder of simulspace engineering and programming and includes options for virtual versions of all of the popular biomorphs, including a wide variety of mental enhancements. The recreational and entertainment options it presents are endless.
Nevertheless, many consider Virtual Africa to be a gilded cage. Most of the infomorphs are indentured bitworkers with lengthy contracts in order to pay off the evacuation, iZulu establishment, and Virtual Africa fees with which they are saddled. Most of them harbor a fair amount of jealousy and resentment towards the physical residents, especially the habitat’s wealthy elite. A few of them have even made a bold political statement, refusing to resleeve when offered an opportunity. They demand better pay and contracts for infomorph work and the opportunity to egocast to other habitats or resleeve at more reasonable rates, and they want to see a plan instituted to re-instantiate all of the infomorphs remaining within 10 years, as well as activating the million plus egos in dead storage. The potential for some form of large-scale civil unrest on iZulu remains high.
===The Daphnis Project=== 
A growing segment of iZulu’s infomorph population are no longer content to work off their lengthy indentures or to wait for the colony’s elites to resolve the embodiment problem. Instead, they are undertaking an ambitious plan to create their own habitat. Under the dual banners of freedom and cultural preservation, these infomorphs have reached out to a group of [[Titanian Commonwealth|Titanian]] microcorps and sought their help in creating a habitat in the tiny nearby moonlet Daphnis. Their original plan was to create a beehive habitat, but this moon is a rough disk nine kilometers in diameter and six kilometers thick and is an ideal candidate for transformation into a Hamilton cylinder. Today, the ultimate goal of the Daphnis Project is to create more than a thousand square kilometers of a remade Africa that will become home to most of the iZulu infomorphs and a fair quantity of recreated African wildlife. Essentially, the Daphnis Project hopes to make Virtual Africa real.
It’s an impressively ambitious plan for people who can’t afford bodies or living space on their home habitat, but the Titanians have already taken the proposal to the Plurality and received Commonwealth support. The iZulu leaders are alternately dismissive and worried about the Daphnis Project. They are unable to do much about it, however, not wanting to risk a loss of rep with their autonomist allies or imperil the major gas mining contracts they have with the Commonwealth.

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