**Posted by:** Atalee Bonedanse, Firewall Scanner <__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__>
Welcome to the deep black. If you’ve come to the fringe looking for friends, turn back now. This is the darkest, coldest, loneliest part of the system. Most of the natives guard their secrets closely and don’t take well to visitors. Agents are advised to keep their curiosity in check and mind their manners. Out here, a corpse in the recycler doesn’t raise too many questions.
Next to privacy, the major industries of the fringe are research and prospecting. Most of the fringe is too inaccessible for commercial exploitation. Life is more a matter of survival than proﬁt, so the hypercorps keep out. It’s only when they want to do something really dangerous or anti-social that you’ll ﬁnd them skulking around.
Despite the difﬁculties, a few places have found ways to get by, offering freedom from the stranglehold of the inner system. At the request of your proxy, I’ve pulled some ﬁles of notable locations that may relate to your work. These documents are for your eyes only—even most of Firewall isn’t aware of half of the stuff that’s buried out here on the fringe.
=Outer System Niches= 
The rimward side of the solar system is vast. Even when you account for the major planetary systems, the Belt, and the various Trojans, there’s a lot of space out there still, and not all of it is empty. If someone wants to ﬁnd a nice, quiet little spot to do their thing, there are plenty of options: unoccupied Lagrange zones, the centaurs zipping through gas giant orbits, and other erratic asteroids and comets on highly elliptic and inclined orbits, just to start.
* [[Alpha Plus]]
* [[Conch]]
* [[New Sarpalius]]
* [[Thunder on the Horizon]] (10370 Hylonome)
=Kuiper Belt (30-55 AU)= 
Lying just past the orbit of Neptune is a disc of ice and dust known as the Kuiper Belt. It is home to over a hundred planetoids, including Pluto, Haumea, and Eris, and thousands of asteroids large enough to conceal a habitat. Most Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) are a mix of ice and rock which pre-date the genesis of the sun. Though sparsely populated, most transhuman activity takes place in the “classical” Kuiper Belt, between 42 and 48 AU, where frozen volatiles, complex organic molecules, and rare minerals are more easily harvested.
Habitats here are sporadic and politically disparate. They are often carved from the inside of larger asteroids and use thick layers of ice for structural support and shielding from radiation and impacts. Vast distances between them necessitate complete self-sufﬁciency. The further a habitat is from the sun, the more dependent it becomes on mining to provide for fusion and chemical power generation. Heavy metals are scarce, limiting industry, conventional construction, and the adoption of new tech.
Duplex and high-density transmissions are limited by their range. A lack of effective communication has prevented political and cultural uniﬁcation and created a wide variety of reclusive niches. Exhumans, criminals, [[anarchists]], [[ultimates]], out’sters, and [[brinkers]] have all found the isolation of the belt ideal to their pursuits. Piracy has grown in some corners, due to reliance on automated craft between poorly defended habitats. Social order is tempered with paranoia, and enforced through the barrel of a gun. Failed and abandoned habitats are relatively common, set adrift and left to rust among the frozen bodies of the belt.
==Getting to the Fringe== 
Rim habitats like [[Whiskey]] are a necessary stop-over for anyone egocasting to the Oort cloud without the beneﬁt of qubits. Safe egocasting to the Kuiper Belt from within the solar system can take anywhere from 3 to 80 hours on average, depending on the point of origin. Egocasting out to the Oort Cloud, however, can be completed in no less than 11 days without risking serious ego corruption. Travel by antimatter couriers from the inner system to the inner Oort Cloud takes, at minimum, ten years.
* [[Haumea]] (35 AU)
* [[Markov]]
* [[Habitat on the Rock]] (35 AU)
* [[Whiskey]] (37 AU)
* [[Frozen Dreams]] (48 AU)
* [[Pluto]] (48 AU)
* [[Eris]] (55 AU)
* [[Sedna]] (88 AU)
* [[Haven]] (120 AU)
* [[Thorne]] (850 AU)
=The Oort Cloud= 
The Oort Cloud is a sphere of dust and asteroids that extends to the edge of the gravitational reach of the sun. The difﬁculties of life without infrastructure in the Kuiper Belt are compounded in the Oort Cloud. Because of this, the transhuman population in the Oort Cloud is less than 15,000, almost all restricted to a handful of ships and research outposts within the Inner Oort Cloud. The Inner Oort Cloud, from 2,000 to 5,000 AU, marks the outermost expansion of transhumanity. Several millions of asteroids are documented, ranging from a few meters to 2,000 kilometers across. Resources include ice, organics, minerals, and, due to heavy exposure to cosmic wind, a number of rare elements including lithium and boron, though commercial mining is unfeasible.
The Outer Oort Cloud extends to 150,000 AU from the sun to interstellar space. The Outer Oort Cloud has been the subject of signiﬁcant scientiﬁc scrutiny as the frontier for astronomy, physics, and space ﬂight. Only three pre-Fall probes have breached the area; it otherwise remains beyond the reach of transhumanity. The Outer Oort Cloud is scanned by hundreds of thousands of professional and amateur telescopes, watching for the return of the TITANs or the arrival of Factor lighthuggers.
* [[Wisdom]] (2,500 AU)
* [[The Nest]] (3,000 AU)
* [[Evangelium]] (3,000 AU)
* [[Crystal Wind|ICS-201 Crystal WInd]] (4,000 AU)
* [[Tycho Brahe|IOCC-226 Tycho Brahe]] (8,000 AU)
* [[Ningjing]] (30,000 AU)
* [[Tyche]] (50,000 AU)

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