=True North= 
**Posted by:** Magnus Ming, Titan Autonomous University <__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__>[[toc]]
From [[Aarhus]] to [[Nyhavn]] is a journey of 3,000 kilometers—an easy jaunt by suborbital, but, if one can spare the time, best done on foot. One doesn’t learn to respect a world gazing down on it from orbit. Titan’s wilderness is one of the harshest environments in the solar system, one that humbles our transhuman hopes for a material order that will succumb readily to attempts to tame it. There is much beauty to be found in the untamed coastlines of the hydrocarbon lakes, the drifting dunes, the play of methane clouds overhead.
I have never felt so transient and insignificant as on my ﬁrst trek, decades before the Fall, from the tiny research station at Aarhus to the new colony site at Nyhavn. A catastrophic equipment failure had caused us to lose communications with Nyhavn, which at that point was an entirely automated outpost in the process of being constructed by robots. New settlers were to arrive in six months’ time, and the base at Aarhus was too small to support them. It was vital that the Nyhavn base be ready to receive them.
Vicious spring storms had destroyed one of our aircraft and critically damaged the other, and we were unwilling to risk our few precious rovers on uncharted terrain. Eleven of us set out on foot to restore communication and ﬁnish preparing Nyhavn for habitation. Our LOTV we kept in reserve in case it became necessary to abandon the surface. The arriving colony ship carried enough supplies to both re-provision the ﬁrst team and seed the second colony, but only in combination with ice and other volatiles harvested from the surface. The possibility that we would have to scrub the colonization mission and return both teams to [[Earth]] (very slowly, in cryo) hung over all of us.
Today, I hike the rugged hills around Aarhus and sail methane skiffs on Ontario Lacus for recreation, but in those days, any overland journey was a deadly serious business. To look backward at hundreds of kilometers of identical, trackless aeolian ridges, each in proﬁle the same perfect sine wave as the one preceding it, and to look forward at another hundred kilometers of the exact same landscape, broken only by the occasional sawtooth ridge of rock and ice, knowing one must somehow cross all of it … it tugged at one’s sanity, even given the rational knowledge that one was well provisioned with the technology needed for physical survival.
Yet, I have never felt so alive as on that march. Before the Fall, we believed we had made the physical world a safe and easy place for ourselves. It was seldom that we were truly tested. What Titan lacked in big, picturesque threats—we had neither cell-cooking ionizing radiation nor rampant cryovolcanism to contend with—it more than made up for in weather. Mean surface temperature during our journey from Aarhus to Nyhavn was –190 C—a cold spring. We encountered one violent lightning storm—a terrifying experience given the lack of shelter—and managed to avoid several others. It also rained many times, something you’ll currently experience nowhere else in the solar system—never mind that the rainfall was liquid methane.
In the wilds, everyone was an island. One stayed in one’s suit on a trek with no vehicles. Portable shelters that could withstand surface temperatures of –180 C were still bulky affairs in those days, and we’d opted against them. The only shared contact occurred during rest periods, when we’d link our suits to a portable life support pod to balance out suit chemical reservoirs. The rest periods themselves were arbitrary. The Titanian day and year are identical—about ﬁfteen standard days long. Titan always shows the same face to Saturn; the unaltered haze, faintly illuminated by light reﬂected from the planet, was a constant.
Sounds reached us in our suits, an unfamiliar sensation to those accustomed to being suited in vacuum. Titan’s thick atmosphere blocks virtually all sunlight, but carries sound better than Earth’s atmosphere due to its density. The howl of wind, the occasional rain, the faint crunch of ice and carbon grit underfoot, and one’s own respiration were the only noises. The trekkers conversed hardly at all, nor did we distract ourselves much with the mesh. Concentration was everything; any of a hundred small mistakes could be deadly. We reached what is today the metropolis of Nyhavn after a trek of twelve weeks, but the stark isolation of the journey had made it feel much longer. Removing one’s suit after that long was like hatching from an egg.
With three major cities and myriad smaller settlements, Titan doesn’t lack for civilization. We’ve mastered much. But when all’s said and done, we are fragile little beings. When the airlock closed behind the last of our team on completing the trek to Nyhavn, shared exaltation cut straight through our weariness. We’d survived a trial none of us would ever have faced in our staid academic lives back on Earth. Titan’s gift to us, one we all received during the First Settlement, was the unforgiving certainty that our physical environment was something we might endure, but never master.
=Geography and Resources= 
Imagine how old Earth’s landscape would have looked if one removed plant life from the equation. All of the other forces that shaped Earth shape Titan also. Mountains and volcanoes rise due to tectonic shifts in the icy crust and cryovolcanic upwellings from our planet’s water-ammonia mantle. Wind and waves carve beautiful aeolian ice forms and twisting coastlines. Rivers and streams of methane and ethane crisscross vast areas of the planet, draining into lakes as large as some of Earth’s seas.
Titan is covered in a dense haze of clouds and carbon smog. This atmosphere, thicker and more massive than earth’s, displays complex weather patterns that change with the seasons. The combination of dense atmosphere and low gravity makes high-altitude winds extremely hazardous for aircraft. Winds in the lower atmosphere tend not to be as ﬁerce, allowing transhumans to ﬂy with arm-mounted wings and to sail on the methane lakes.
Most of Titan is covered by rolling, icy terrain. Thin layers of gritty ice and carbon soil form here and there, but with no vegetation to anchor the soil, it drifts constantly, forming seas of dunes that end only when broken up by mountain ranges. The huge swaths of dark terrain one sees from orbit are mostly covered by shifting carbon dunes.
The hills and mountains are themselves of ice. One would call them glaciers on Earth, but Titan’s deep cold ice, never subjected to the Sun’s warmth, behaves much more like rock. Only in the depths, tens of kilometers below the surface, where tidal warming from Saturn and the presence of ammonia have kept it liquid, does water exist. Water is Titan’s magma, shoved periodically to the surface by tidal bending. These effusions yield cryovolcanic eruptions—rarer than elsewhere rimward, but still frequent enough to have rewritten Titan’s surface.
Titan possesses the chemistry to support life in abundance, but metals are incredibly rare here. Prospecting for silicates and exotic carbonaceous compounds (like asphalt and parafﬁns) on Titan is steady work, but ﬁnding lodes of metal will make one’s reputation overnight. Titanian engineers use metals sparingly, avoiding them completely whenever possible. Aerogel, diamond, fullerenes, and other carbon and silica-derived materials prevail. Where metal is used, it’s frequently foamed or worked into strong, light structures to use as little as possible.
Titanian prospecting in the [[Main Belt]] creates further friction with the [[Planetary Consortium]] and
the [[Jovian Republic|Jovians]]. [[Mars]], [[Jupiter]], and Titan all vie for big strikes, because transporting a large, rich metallic asteroid is cheaper than multiple smaller claims.
The [[Extropians]], perpetually open for business, have no qualms about jumping a claim. This, along with the diplomatic factors in play and the predations of pirates, means that Fleet spends a great deal of time guarding the ore freighters of the [[Titanian Commonwealth|Commonwealth]] Merchant Marine.
===Sidebar: Metal Pigs=== 
Fullerite plating made from aggregated diamond nanotubes. It’s in our sidewalks, fuckers: compressive strength like nature never bothered with. Also carbon nanotubes. Nanotubes, everywhere, and not the crappy kind kids on Jupiter design for science projects. No: beautiful, multiwalled nanotubes, honeycombs nested in honeycombs. Fucking honey-ﬂavored, sp2-bonded masterworks, all out of carbon silt from the dunes. MWNTs bring the tensile strength. You can make sidewalks, space elevators, or a pig sticker out of this carbonaceous beehive dream shit.
So why the fuck do we need so much metal? The oldsters say it’s strategy—secure it, conquer it, deny it to the Consortium. The microcorp mavens cite industrial needs. Pig logic. Heard of the Commonwealth Strategic Metals Reserve? Hundreds of thousands of tons of metal, stashed away in Skathi and other places. Fleet’s very quiet about it. We don’t need as much as they claim for molecular-width circuitry, foil shielding, or reactor containment.
It’s all an owner’s game, pissing on asteroids and stretches of the ITN because we just can’t help pissing on things. Pig logic. Fuck pig logic. Now that you know better, stop voting for this expansionist metal mining bullshit.
—Momo von Satan, Tech Commentator, Monster Raving Goblin Cock News Network
=Demographics and Language= 
Titan has 60 million citizens. While its culture bears strong inﬂuences from the original, mostly Scandinavian settlers, Titan is a true melting plot, with virtually every old Earth ethnicity and every transhuman species represented. Uplifts and AGIs hold full citizenship and legal rights in the [[Titanian Commonwealth|Commonwealth]], and indentured servitude is illegal. Although synth morphs are somewhat uncommon here, one duty of the Ministry of Justice and Equality is to advocate for citizens sleeved in synths or pods in cases of discrimination.
Titan’s original settlers, myself included, represented the North Atlantic Consortium, a think tank drawing mostly from universities in Scandinavia, Finland, and Canada. Seventy percent of the original settlers spoke one of the Nordic tongues. Even in those days, nationalism was no longer the done thing, but with the spread of Mandarin and English, linguistic preservationism was a popular meme.
We settled on Skandinavíska, a register of Danish spoken by Icelanders, because of its mutual intelligibility with Swedish and Norwegian. As the official language of the Commonwealth government, the majority of Titanian citizens are ﬂuent in Skandinavíska, and almost everyone understands at least a bit of it. Other languages widely spoken include all of the Nordic tongues, Finnish, French, English, and Mandarin. Lastly, an interesting bit of trivia: what are thought to be the last handful of surviving native speakers of Scots Gaelic and Faeroese hold Commonwealth citizenship.
===Sidebar: The North Atlantic Consortium=== 
So Titan’s benevolent founders come from Earth on a mission of peace and enlightenment, settle their new world in a spirit of cooperation, and found the Commonwealth to govern their like-minded fellow citizens, leading them into a new age of knowledge and shared prosperity. Just me, or do they sound a lot more like bodhisattvas than your typical tenure-grubbing university professors?
The North Atlantic Consortium was supposedly a group of intellectuals from countries working on a shared problem: they were developed, rich nations situated on real estate that was freezing over due to climate change. Even with the technology to survive on that real estate, over the long run they’d become pauper nations. They’d run out of the hydrocarbon resources and ﬁsheries that made them wealthy, they wouldn’t be able to farm, they’d become completely dependent upon imports, and they’d suffer a brain drain from their best minds moving south.
The NAC Titan project explored a radical solution: colonizing a world with even worse weather, but where wealth in the form of hydrocarbon energy literally rains from the sky. The Titan colonies started as a serious but modestly scaled experiment, but when the Fall came, the NAC nations quickly went all in. Titan’s population grew from two million to sixty million in the decade between the Fall and the present day.
You won’t ﬁnd much hard evidence of the North Atlantic Consortium. The oldsters from the First Settlement speak fondly of that noble experiment, but apparently they lost all the paperwork in the Fall. But if you mine the data enough, you start to see connections. Microcorps for which the ﬁrst records all begin on the same day of AF 0 start the trail. Some of them—Maersk-Varner, Torvick Aerospace, Dansk Ecosphere Informatics (DEI)—are rumored to have ties to, among other entities, the pre-Fall central bank of Finland; Danish and Canadian genetics ﬁrms; business elites throughout Scandinavia; and the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish royal families. A total of eighteen microcorps hold a grandfathered-in status called Section Three, exempting them from the usual transparency regulations and Plurality governance. None of them are well known—[[Gatekeeper Corporation|Gatekeeper]] is not among them—but they’re all old, established, and generate tidy incomes that go, well, we know not where.
Equality for the polity? To a degree. Your average working stiff on Titan lives like a king (or an autonomist) compared to the beleaguered workers of Mars. But there’s still an elite hiding behind the curtain, and though they might not be as greedy as inner system oligarchs, make no mistake: the NAC settlement of Titan was carried out to protect their interests.
—Balthazar Grimes, A-Bloc dissident
=History= 
We lost so much in the Fall that it beggars description, but our greatest loss may have been our knowledge of history. More than any other transhuman faction, Titanians are obsessed with history. Rareﬁed disciplines such as cliometrics and cliodynamics enjoy prominence in our university faculties, and history holds a huge slice of mindshare in the Titanian media. The interests of my university students are illustrative. When I was young, it was sexy to be an artist, a musician, or a game designer. Today, it’s the students of history whose beds are never empty on a weekend night—and that is all to the good.
==First Settlement== 
I’ve already described the times of the First Settlement in my account of the trek from Aarhus to Nyhavn. They were eventful, dangerous, and extremely uncomfortable. Such is the lot of pioneers. Yet during this time, we also established the Plurality and laid the foundations of Titanian society.
==Northern Diaspora== 
Prior to the Fall, Earth’s northernmost nations, with the conspicuous exception of Russia, bought in heavily to transhumanism. Climate change on Earth had disrupted ocean currents that once kept northern Europe warm and livable. The populations of Scandinavia, Canada, and other northern countries had huddled into overcrowded, frozen conurbations, and now they left them in a mass migration for Titan. Our world was just as cold and much darker, but Titan offered opportunity and rich natural resources. For the egocasting transhumanist migrants, dozens of Titan-adapted exotic morph conﬁgurations were on offer. Older Titanians will remember (perhaps without much fondness) oddities such as the linnorm, sildeﬂokk, and trold morphs. It took the Fall to bring bipedal humanoid forms back into vogue.
==The Fall== 
Titan was a major destination for infugees, particularly from NAC countries. Where elsewhere the Fall was a physical struggle, on Titan it was a computer war. The second wave of infugee uploads to reach Titan through the relays, about 3.5 million egos, were infected with the virulent Höðr virus. Höðr was a destructive, polymorphic virus designed by the TITANs themselves to erase data and sew chaos. Aside from causing the loss of millions of uploaded egos, Höðr got loose in planetary networks, where it annihilated stored data by the exabyte before it could be contained.
Meanwhile, Titanian industry, which until then had produced little in the way of military hardware, worked feverishly to build defenses. Titan’s rudimentary orbital defense grid was expanded and hardened. Fleet grew from a small tactical force of a few dozen customs cutters to an armada of capital ships capable of projecting force throughout the outer system. But the enemy never quite arrived. The Battle of [[Iapetus]] comprised little more than several skirmishes with TITAN killsats followed by surface bombing raids. The TITANs never counterattacked in any substantial way, and by the time Commonwealth marines made planetfall, the TITANs had mysteriously abandoned their matrioshka brain project. The only other major military engagement during the Fall was Operation Jotunhammar, Fleet’s operation to secure heavy metal supply lines from the Main Belt. Most of the ﬁghting during Jotunhammar was against Jovian ships trying to jump claims rather than the TITANs.
=The Locus Conflict= 
Having lost few ships in the ﬁghting against the TITANs, the Commonwealth emerged as a major power post-Fall. Debate in the Plurality weighed the beneﬁts of expansionism (advocates tried to call it “protectionism”) versus detente with our anarchist neighbors. Some argued that the autonomists could never stand against renewed hostilities with the TITANs, while others felt that Titan must concentrate on strengthening its own defenses and resleeving infugees. In the end, the latter argument carried the day.
Then the [[Planetary Consortium]] attacked [[Locus]], using alleged anarchist claim jumping in the Main Belt as its casus belli. Public opinion on Titan considered this outrageous, little more than a thin excuse to lash out at so-called intellectual property violators. Despite ideological differences with the anarchists, most on Titan saw the Consortium as the real enemy.
The Plurality closely followed reports of the battle from the Titanian military attaché at Locus and various journalists. The reports portrayed a surprisingly well-coordinated defense, followed by the Consortium ﬂeet retreating in disarray.
The repulsion of the invasion permanently silenced those who still argued for Titan to absorb its neighbors into the Commonwealth. Now the Plurality was calling for mutual defense pacts with the autonomists. When a second Martian expedition attacked Locus, the Titanian Fleet fought alongside the anarchists, handing the Consortium a resounding defeat. The doctrine of “diverse economies; one alliance” remains the majority opinion in the Plurality today.
===Sidebar: What Really Happened at Locus?=== 
[Excerpted Transcript from Monster Raving Goblin Cock News Network’s talking heads program, “Chewy Gristle Commentary Hour”]
**The Cock:** MING TELL LIES ABOUT LOCUS INCURSION IN NEW HISTORY ACCOUNT.
**Momo von Satan:** Your accusation, while intriguing, lacks credibility. How about some fucking evidence on that, Cock? By the way, for those not on drugs, the Cock is referring to Professor Magnus Ming’s recent series of posts, Counting Memory, on the occasion of the ten-year anniversary of the Fall.
**The Cock:** MING NO MENTION SOCIALIST INTERPLANETARY MEME WARFARE.
**Momo von Satan:** The rumor that the Interplanetary deployed propagandizing oneironanites prior to the conﬂict was most likely contrived by eunuchized Extropian basement trolls looking for a fast hit of rep. This infographic behind me showing that thousands of bloggers mentioned pro-technosocialist dreams in posts before the battle proves nothing.
**The Cock:** LIIIIIIEEEES!
**Momo von Satan:** Silence, Cock. I’m trying to conduct fucking journalism here.
[End Transcript]
==Age of Accelleration== 
Since the Locus Conﬂict, Titan keeps an uneasy peace with the Consortium and the Jovians. Normalized diplomatic relations led to the opening of Titanian embassies to all major inner system governments. Only the Jovians continue to conduct diplomacy remotely; they’re reluctant to allow modiﬁed humans aboard their habitats.
=Crime= 
Titan is socially liberal. Forking, open microfacturing blueprints, and most drugs are legal, their use regulated by reputation and custom rather than law. Violent crime is uncommon, with much of it accounted for by mental health issues rather than typical criminal motives. The ubiquity of heavy armament among the populace may account for this, along with the difﬁculty of committing crimes using an easy-to-trace, government-issued weapon.
==St. Catherine Tong== 
Based in [[New Quebec]] and strongly associated with morph trafﬁcking, the St. Catherine Tong started as a harmless benevolent society for Chinese immigrants to New Quebec. Its meeting hall was on the Rue St. Catherine. Many Chinese had found jobs as inspectors and handlers in the clone vats. Following the Fall, Guanxi operators subverted the tong, ﬁrst by using intimidation to get workers to look the other way, later by directly taking it over.
The tong’s main rackets include diverting morphs from Titan’s public resleeving program for private resale, resleeving kidnapped egos in stolen morphs to work as slaves or sex workers, and installing illegal biomods (such as poison glands, which are illegal on Titan) on otherwise legal morphs.
The St. Catherine Tong is more than a small time cartel of skin thieves. The gang has aspirations to diversify, and they’ve aroused our interest with alarming regularity of late. A cache of TITAN war gear was retrieved from one of their safehouses amid the cloning vats recently, its provenance unknown. I’ve had sentinels pursuing some disturbing leads that suggest that it came from Iapetus or somewhere in the Titanian wilderness. Although there were no outbreaks of TITAN activity on Titan itself during the fall, large swathes of the wilds are still uninhabited.
The tong has a reputation for staging brutal public assassinations of enemies and doesn’t shrink from inflicting collateral damage on bystanders. Their bosses and enforcers act as if they were unafraid of being apprehended. This is in part because they’re incredibly hard to track; they have an endless supply of new morphs and top-notch facilities for augmentation and cosmetic modiﬁcation. Conversely, their enemies face some particularly unpleasant options for resleeving if captured. One boss, Luc Hoi, is rumored to keep a tank full of cyberbrain-equipped koi housing the egos of former rivals.
==Reboot Gangs== 
Not everyone resleeved under the One Body per Mind policy wants to integrate into Commonwealth society. Nyhavn in particular has a large underclass of working people who haven’t resolved themselves to the loss of Earth, don’t wish to participate in the Plurality, and won’t adapt to the reputation economy. Some of these people turn to crime, joining reinstanced gangs such as the Wipes, the Freebeers, and the Jokers. Though largely a nuisance at present, there is some concern that Consortium agents-provocateurs could organize these gangs into a more dangerous force.
===Sidebar=== 
So I have to vote every six hours, I’m expected to clean recycling vats in the name of ‘community,’ and I live in a cold dark hell hole at the ass end of the solar system? And that’s the good life? The fuck is wrong with these people? I’d rather spend sixteen years as a robot slave on Mars. Then I could work off my indenture, get rich, and own a bunch of pleasure pods with big tits. That’d be the life. This is a bunch of shit.
—Nils Högarn, Rebooted gang leader
==Kron Kartelyeĭ== 
The ﬂow and use of the Titanian kroner is heavily regulated in a way designed to encourage investment in Plurality-chartered microcorps. It’s a currency that is invested but rarely spent. Loopholes exist, however, and several semi-legitimate banks specialize in exploiting them. Once kroners move out of the microcorp system, they’re real money, a liquid asset. Sometimes desperate Titanians needing credits in other parts of the system make deals with these banks (many of which go badly for the person trying to change their money).
Other times, the Kartelyeı˘ are involved in what amounts to little more than wire fraud. They’re red market operations, often with their central hubs located in places like [[Phelan's Recourse|Phelan’s Recourse]] or Extropia. Short of sending Labor and Finance Ministry strike teams to exact vendettas against the Kartelyeı˘, there’s little that can be done about their operations.
The Kartelyeı˘ do have agents on the ground. Few have ever been charged successfully with involvement in money laundering; Kartelyeı˘ VPNs are a tough hack. The Kartelyeı˘ are largely of Russian or Ukrainian ethnicity and, in addition to banking, run almost all of the chess boxing leagues (legitimate and otherwise) on Titan.
==Gloom, Cold, and Madness== 
Titan’s mental health services, unfortunately, keep very busy. The high incidence of seasonal affective disorder
and related conditions among ethnic Scandinavians made its way into the hazer gene line, and it’s proven startlingly difﬁcult to eliminate. While habitats tend to be very well lit and the hazer morph’s enhanced vision augmentations compensate somewhat, the perpetual gloom outside is still more than some can bear. Recent years have seen several high proﬁle cases involving grisly murders committed by people in high-stress occupations or stationed at far-ﬂung outposts. At least one of these murders, though, was more than a case of someone snapping due to environmental stress. I refer you to the report of our sentinel, a psychologist employed by the Commonwealth Police.
===Sidebar: Exovirus: Vittrad Strain=== 
I was assigned to examine the suspect in a murder at Halsskär, a remote island on a lacus in the Belet region. I was one of a panel. Our purpose: to determine whether the subject, Ernst Valikko, was ﬁt to stand trial. Valikko served as carbon mining engineer on a team of four; the others were technicians. Halsskär sits atop rich deposits of asphalts and other complex carbonaceous compounds, and the team had been mining from the island down into the ice under the lake bed.
Valikko killed and dismembered the rest of the team using a stunner and an assortment of mining equipment, taking two unawares in their bunks and the third down in the tunnels. After dismembering them, he burned off their faces and most of their skin but didn’t bother with their cortical stacks. Two of the four victims were so badly traumatized by their deaths that it seems unlikely they’ll be capable of giving testimony against their attacker.
Valikko wouldn’t willingly look at other people for more than a few seconds. The only way to interview him was through a teleoperated synth, at which point he haltingly explained the change he’d begun to see in other people. At ﬁrst I assumed he was hallucinating, but Ernst Valikko actually sees the effects of entropy on the transhuman body in magniﬁed and horriﬁc detail. A tiny broken capillary on my nose affected him the way viewing a hideous deformity would a normal person.
Valikko could identify minor genetic defects and ailments in the people around him with complete accuracy simply by glancing at them. He could also see structural ﬂaws, material stress, and minor damage in physical objects around him, although this aspect of his ability didn’t affect him in the way that looking at people did.
Blood work conﬁrmed that Valikko had become infected with a hitherto unknown exsurgent virus strain. The Vittrad strain, as I haved dubbed it, bears some similarity to Watts-MacLeod. Valikko’s ability to perceive entropic effects in living and non-living material is essentially an async power—but one over which he has no control.
Once Valikko’s infection was conﬁrmed, his morph was destroyed and his stack turned over to Fleet Intel for storage. The question of how an exotic exovirus strain infected Ernst Valikko in the Titanian wilds remains unanswered.
—Karsten Hauer, Sentinel, Titanian Wilderness
=Media= 
Titanian media outlets are a bit of a paradox. On one hand, all are state-owned microcorps. On the other, the wide variation of tastes among the voting audience means little homogeneity among them. They range from staid news programs presented by old-fashioned suited anchorpeople to the downright bizarre.
==Plurality Aggregator Channels== 
The closest thing Titan has to traditional news programs, the PACs report on current events and debates in the Plurality in a video blog format. PAC-1 and PAC-2, the main Social Democrat and Socialist news vlogs, strongly resemble anchored news programs of a century ago. Others, like PAC-9, the Pirat party vlog, look less like blogs and more like the allusive, reference-saturated image boards of the early 21st century, with links to legislation peppered here and there.
==Entertainment and Recreation== 
Numerous microcorps focus entirely on sports, gaming, music, drama, and other forms of entertainment. Titan’s most popular pastimes are football (adapted for Titan’s low gravity by enlarging the goalie’s box slightly and adding a second ball to keep things interesting) and augmented reality roleplaying games (descended from the long tradition of live action roleplaying in the Nordic countries). I have trouble at my age keeping track of trends in music, but lately my students have been playing music that sounds like 2050s revival bhangra married to Swedish polskas. Other popular activities include competitive pole dancing, chess boxing, pre-Fall period dramas, hiking and sailing in the wilderness, and lugeboarding (similar to skateboarding, but done in a 100-meter-deep half pipe excavated in the ice).
===Monster Raging Goblin Cock News Network=== 
MRGCNN is currently the most popular comedy news program on Titan. The presenters are Momo von Satan, a diminutive, gothed-out Japanese woman, and The Cock, an AR projection of a red-eyed, toothy-mawed, venous gray penis wearing a horned Viking helmet. It is unknown whether The Cock is von Satan’s muse, an AGI, or a puppet controlled by another transhuman. The show consists of von Satan’s sardonic commentary on current events punctuated by The Cock’s subhuman ravings. MRGCNN has garnered wide critical praise despite its bizarre content. Fans of the show, “ragers,” obsessively analyze each clip when it comes out, attempting to ﬁnd the cleverly encrypted easter eggs that often accompany it. Many of the easter eggs are hidden XP tracks featuring Momo von Satan: Momo standing in a waterfall of milk, Momo vivisecting the governor of Valles-New Shanghai and feeding him to school children, and similar bizarre scenarios only vaguely related to the news.
===Capitalism Today with Olie and Yulia=== 
Capitalism Today is a stream of consciousness vlog with embedded snippets of XP. Plenty of inner system media makes it out to Titan. Capitalism Today makes memetic salad out of it, mashing up Martian simulspace games, songs, and reality shows with VR projections of the hosts, Olie and Yulia, to create a nightmarish landscape of violence, polished speeches, and consumer lust. This type of commentary through juxtaposition is common in Titanian media. When the assumption is that the viewer’s muse has already ﬁlled them in on all of the facts of the day, it’s an interesting interpretation of them that makes the reputation of media presenters.
=Microcorps= 
Microcorps vary in the degree of autonomy allowed for in their charters. Some operate as virtual extensions of the policy makers in their afﬁliated ministries. Such is the case with the microcorps operating the New Quebec clone vats, whose day-to-day operations are closely tied to production quotas set by the Ministry of Biodevelopment. Others, such as Gatekeeper, are only partly owned by the Plurality. Finally, there are the Section Three microcorps, whose activities receive considerable Plurality oversight, but whose ﬁnances are not subject to the same transparency as other microcorps.
The biggest difference between microcorps and hypercorps is that Titanian kroners earned working at a microcorp can’t be spent; they can only be re-invested. Therefore, microcorp employees are motivated not by money, but by reputation. This in turn serves to reinforce Janteloven (in short, “don’t think you’re better than us”), because a good reputation tends to be earned through consensus rather than competition.
==Abramsen Munsch Boxleitner (AMB)== 
AMB is a Section Three microcorp and one of several consultancies that advise the Plurality on economic development and long-term strategy. Economic reports from AMB and a handful of other ﬁrms exert a powerful inﬂuence on how the Plurality votes. The founder, former Finance and Labor Minister Snorri Abramsen, now in reclusive semi-retirement, is famous as architect of the Titanian economic system. While widely credited with being the brains behind Titanian prosperity, AMB is also the bête-noire of conspiracy theorists obsessed with the NAC and Section Three microcorps.
==Gatekeeper== 
The best known of Titan’s microcorps, Gatekeeper operates the original [[Pandora Gate]] on Saturn’s moon [[Pandora]]. Gatekeeper has been extensively reported upon elsewhere, but it’s worth nothing that Gatekeeper is not a Section Three microcorp, nor are the majority of its shares owned by the Plurality.
==Isaacson Mauer Ogembe (IMO)== 
IMO is a quiet but highly inﬂuential law ﬁrm that represents offworld interests such as Lunar reputation banks, Extropian mining concerns, and Venusian aerostat construction companies. Rumor has it that some of the “Extropian” companies are actually fronts for Martian hypercorps. If this turned out to be true, and if IMO knew who they were really dealing with, Commonwealth law would require that their charter to do business be immediately revoked. The principals of the ﬁrm would likely face criminal charges as well. IMO keeps such a low proﬁle, though, that a Plurality inquiry into their dealings is currently unlikely.
==Pagan Seed== 
Pagan Seed is a New Quebec body fashion house. They grow high-end morphs like sylphs and olympians, but their main business is faces. The sheer number of hazers grown in New Quebec introduces the risk of physical looks being too similar. Morph psychologists have known for some time that too much facial homogeneity in a population raises the risk of mental health problems, so Pagan Seed’s function is to constantly tweak gene lines according to a facial diversity algorithm, assuring that no two hazers look too much alike.
==Vakker Ordnance Works (VOW)== 
VOW is Titan’s premier arms company, specializing in drone swarms and ship-mounted weaponry. VOW is another Section Three microcorp founded by early colonists. The full extent of its wealth is unknown, but based on the size and quality of its R&D facilities, it must be vast. In recent years, VOW has been lobbying the Plurality (so far without success) to allow it to sell arms to the Morningstar Constellation, an unusual position in that both the Socialists and the fringe Free Market party support it.
=Science= 
Between the Ministry of Science and various microcorps, Titan produces an immense amount of scientiﬁc knowledge, none of which ends up locked away in hypercorp IP ﬁlings. At the same time, Titanian science projects in areas like recovered Titan technology and high-energy physics are a source of concern to Firewall. Some of the most interesting projects are discussed here, but these are only a small sampling.
==Interstellar Space Exploration== 
Titan is the only government in the solar system with an interstellar space program employing sublight space travel rather than Pandora Gates. The Space Exploration Administration’s ﬁrst interstellar mission, the //Crystal Wind//, is transgressing the Inner Oort Cloud on its way to Barnard’s Star. Another self-replicating seedship probe, the //Aubade//, which will use antimatter-catalyzed nuclear-pulse propulsion to reach Proxima Centauri, is nearly complete.
SEA also provides spacecraft for Pandora Gate exploration. Several SEA designs for modular craft designed to be broken down to pass through the small openings in the Gates and reassembled on the other side are now considered old standbys among gatecrashers.
==Immortality Programs== 
Transhuman bodies still age and die, and more importantly, most transhuman egos develop mental health problems in extreme old age. Titanian immortality research currently focuses on geriopsychiatry—ﬁnding and treating the causes of the so-called “immortality blues.” At the same time, basic research in longevity treatments continues, the current goal being to keep a morph alive to 200 years of age.
Some of the physical immortality research is questionable. As soon as I can assemble a team with the right qualiﬁcations, I plan to have sentinels investigate the rumor that TITAN biotech used to modify humans into drone slaves on Iapetus was transferred to one of the immortality research groups.
==The Large Collider== 
Ringing Titan’s north pole like a monumental orbital halo, the Large Collider, at 1,000 kilometers in circumference, is the biggest particle accelerator ever built by transhumanity. The Collider was only recently completed and has been tested successfully but not yet put fully online. Able to speed particles to velocities attainable by no other scientiﬁc apparatus in existence, it promises to enable new and profound discoveries in high energy physics.
==Memetic Civil Defense== 
How does one harden a polity not just against the brutalities of war, which many populations have prevailed against during human history, but against the doubts and fears that come with them? By mathematically modeling the effects of various memes on feelings of safety and well being, psychologists seek to develop civil defense memes: ideas that inoculate against an aggressor’s hostile memes. Ironically, this line of research is another area of concern to Firewall, because researchers have taken a page from the books of Martian advertising ﬁrms, using iterative virtual worlds and accelerated consciousnesses to arrive at faster results.
=Cities= 
Titan’s cities each have their own architectural style and distinctive look, despite similarity in the practical design details. Where cities on other worlds tend to be shaped by terrain and climate, all Titanian cities have a common set of problems to overcome, and their layouts reﬂect this.
Titanian cities are domed, although virtually all of the light in them comes from inside. Titan is a dark world in the visible spectrum. Almost all Titanians have enhanced vision augmentations, and we keep them open to a very broad spectrum of light and electromagnetic energy. The visual culture has picked up on this, and much of Titanian clothing, architecture, and AR graphics can only be fully experienced by those sensitive to radiation beyond visible light.
Domes are lenticular, not hemispherical, their edges supported by massive outer walls of ice shaped into wide cylinders. The ice is in turn reinforced with skeletons of carbon struts to prevent the weight of the dome from slowly deforming it. Tunnels and ﬂyways connect domes within cities, tube railways connect to nearby settlements. Because air and space travel are so cheap, Titan’s rail and road systems don’t yet connect all settlements. However, trunk rail lines converging on Nyhavn do connect the capital to the northern part of the Xanadu region, to carbon-rich Belet in the west, New Quebec in the east, and Aarhus in the south.
Even with the best transhuman technology, insulation and heating are major challenges, and the energy expenditure to keep the domes warm is considerable. The climate inside is usually humid but cool, rarely more than 10 C. Plants and animals are either chosen from hardy species or bioengineered to tolerate cool temperatures.
The upper airspace within domes is mostly kept clear of buildings, allowing for an orderly grid of ﬂyways. Buildings tend to be tall, narrow, and tightly spaced for more efﬁcient energy usage, but regular breaks in the buildings for public parks prevent Titanian cities feeling too claustrophobic.
* [[Nyhavn]]
* [[Aarhus]]
* [[New Quebec]]
=Settlements= 
Outside of the big cities, numerous smaller settlements dot Titan’s surface, oases of warmth and light in the dark, frozen haze of the wilds.
* [[Huvudskär]]
* [[Longueil]]
* [[Stykkishólmur]]
=Orbitals= 
Titan’s low escape velocity makes bringing construction materials and supplies to orbit easy. About a hundred permanently occupied space habitats and thousands of satellites orbit the planet. Many are small cluster habitats, components in the planetary defense grid, or stripped-down orbital manufacturing facilities, but others approach the size of small cities.
* [[Commonwealth Hub]]
* [[Captured Moonlets]]
* [[Mankell]]

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