**Posted by:** Iftikhar Quraini, Gatecrasher <__Info__ __Msg__ __Rep__>
I ﬁrst came to Uranus when I was nineteen.
I was born on [[Earth]]. When the troubles came my parents spent everything they had to get me out. //Everything.// I still remember the drive to the clinic where they uploaded my mind, the twisted feeling in my gut knowing that I would live and my father and mother wouldn’t. I was eleven.
I was egocast to [[Mars]] where [[Cognite]] was nice enough to take me in. As a virtual slave. When I ﬁnally freed myself from the grip of the hypercorps, I decided to move as far away from the sun as I possibly could. The inner system hadn’t been good to me. I wanted out, I wanted to get as far away from that life as possible. Uranus ﬁt the bill perfectly.
Let me tell you about my new home. The last planet in the solar system with any serious population lies just a shade under three billion klicks from Sol. The planet’s extraordinary color comes from the methane in its atmosphere, tinting the clouds a shade that is half blue and half green, like a clear tropical sea on a warm summer day.
Not that anything about Uranus is warm. Mean cloud temperature is a couple hundred degrees south of zero. //Cold.//
Of course, none of this makes the planet unique. In fact, Uranus has a twin: Neptune. The last planet is slightly smaller than its sibling but also slightly more massive. Both worlds have rings and plenty of moons. It turns out they’re not identical twins, though. There’s one big difference. The Uranian equator is inclined 98 degrees to the its orbit. That’s right. Uranus makes its long journey around the sun on its side. Each of its poles gets 42 years in the sun, followed by 42 years of darkness. It’s magnetic ﬁeld is also tipped over, nearly sixty degrees from the planetary equator. Uranus is the only planet in the solar system other than Venus that rotates backwards, east to west.
How did all this happen? Billions of years ago Uranus was the victim of a terrible cataclysm. A planetary-sized object smashed into it, knocking it over.
Which gives me a certain sympathy for this frozen world. All Uranus is doing is trying to hold it together after a disaster of epic proportions.
Something we all know a little bit about.
=Caveats= 
The planet’s disastrous early history plagues the system to this very day. Most interplanetary travel is conﬁned to the ecliptic, the common orbital plane of the solar system. But Uranus’s extreme inclination makes orbital insertion complicated. Instead of gently ﬁring thrusters to set orbit, ships making port around Uranus have to engage in a short, furious burn to swing into the system’s orbital plane. Usually the maneuver is more or less automatic … if you have the fuel to spare. And as long as your navigation system is functioning properly.
If your nav software crashes while you’re making your approach, you’ve got problems. This is not an insertion you can eyeball. Aside from the more than two dozen moons and all the orbital habitats, Uranus has thin but dark rings that extend all the way out to 100,000 klicks. You don’t want to plow through all that garbage at a substantial velocity. It doesn’t take much more than a dozen kps to turn a snowball into a lethal projectile.
=Cloudtops= 
Not only is Uranus literally far from the inner system, but it’s also metaphorically distant. There’s little trace of the [[Planetary Consortium]] out here. Uranus is dominated by autonomists and [[Anarchists|anarchists]] and even [[ultimates]]. All this and the odd brinker, too. (And I do mean //odd//.)
Most of the system’s people can be found on the moons Oberon or Titania or living on an orbital habitat. There’s a whole weird ecology, however, living at the top of the Uranian atmosphere. Everyone calls them skimmers, because their principal economic activity is skimming volatiles (hydrogen, helium-3, methane, water) out of the Uranian atmosphere with remotely operated sleds or aerostat gas collection farms.
Turns out, Uranus isn’t too bad a place for aerostats. [[Jupiter]] has deadly radiation and [[Saturn]] and [[Neptune]] have killer winds, but here the magnetosphere is mild (a hull is sufﬁcient protection) and wind speeds are only half that of Saturn. There are also fewer storms and they don’t last for decades. Add in lower gravity and a cheaper escape velocity with an atmosphere full of useful volatiles, and you have a recipe for Uranus making one of the best gas mining outposts in the system.
==Skimmers== 
Skimmer society is ﬁlled with misﬁts and loners, people living in mini-aerostats that drift on the wind, going wherever Uranus will take them. Some of these vessels are big enough to support a few hundred people. Others are only big enough to support a family or a single, lonely soul.
Who are these skimmers? By far the biggest portion of them are brinkers, isolationists hiding from the rest of the universe. Turns out Uranus is a good place to hide. First off, it’s //big//. The planet’s 51,000-kilometer diameter gives it a lot of surface area. That’s a lot of haystack to search if you’re looking for a particular needle. Second, it’s isolated—between 8 and 30 AU from Saturn, its closest well-populated neighbor. Finally, for a hole in the wall, there’s plenty of resources and even a touch of civilization.
So it’s not a bad place for brinkers to hunker down. Some are religious seekers, people who can’t quite believe the new realities the universe has thrown their way over the past ten years. Or they come from a faith where the established holy ﬁgures let them down and now they’ve gone to the very edge of the system to try and ﬁgure out how to make sense of it. Others are former infugees who didn’t integrate well into autonomist society or broken people ﬂeeing broken lives and hoping Uranus is the place they can put the pieces back together. Then there are those running away from terrible secrets—or terrible crimes. You have to run far to escape your past. For some, nineteen astronomical units is far enough.
The biggest group of brinkers are people who believe The End Is Nigh. Many barely escaped Earth and the horrors they saw shattered their minds. These people are the most dangerous inhabitants of the clouds, because they are waiting on apocalypse, whether it comes in the form of aliens, the Exsurgent virus, or another runaway singularity. They are clinging to a tiny scrap of safety. Which is not to say that everyone that lives among the clouds is a crackpot. There are many perfectly normal people that have embraced the skimmer lifestyle. Some of them will even talk to outsiders.
* [[Varuna]]
=Below the Clouds= 
The skimmer culture provides much-needed raw materials to the rest of the system. It also serves as a relief valve, bleeding off those people too maladapted to live in harmony with their fellow Uranians. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many skimmers are prone to exaggerated stories, weird beliefs, and conspiracy theories. Chief among these are tales of weird things spotted among the clouds.
Most of these are bunk: hallucinations, sensor glitches, ploys for attention, and stories to frighten skimmer kids. Then you realize there’s evidence. Some skimmers have recordings of when they detected strange thermal plumes and encrypted comms below them in the deep clouds. It’s wise to ignore the ravings of lunatics, but I’m not so sure they’re wrong—especially after I reviewed the camera feed from a lost skimmer craft that went down in the equatorial band. Someone’s down there, hiding in the well of Uranus’s atmosphere, someone who doesn’t want us to know they’re there. I have my suspicions, and I know plenty of brinkers that will tell you their theories after a few pints. Hypercorp black labs. Anarchist WMD bunkers. TITAN machines. A secret Factor base. As for any evidence as to what it really is, well, if you’ve got some, Firewall would like a chat with you.
===Sidebar: Nine Frames=== 
At first, it’s nothing but dark cloudscape, great billowing towers of hydrogen only dimly lit by the far sun. The camera’s plunging towards those clouds, racing toward the ﬂat top of a massive light blue cumulonimbus. The massive formation goes on and on and on, big enough to swallow a habitat. Big enough to swallow the nucleus of a comet.
Hydrogen skimmer zeta tau one seven six four is in trouble. Engine failure alerts ﬂash. The craft has lost attitude control. It’s going down.
Then there’s nothing but dull blue as the skimmer plunges into the cloud, its camera still reporting its pointless demise.
Five seconds. Ten. Twenty. The skimmer dives through the cumulonimbus and into a deeper, thicker cloud, this one tinged with yellow from ammonia and organic compounds. Pressure alarms ﬂash. The descent goes on forever. Nothing but speed and cloud as gravity works its deadly will. Then—
STOP. A shadow at the edge of the frame or maybe a dark patch of especially dense organics.
STOP. The shadow doubles in size, taking up the bottom, left corner of the frame. A shadow of what?
STOP. The thing grows again. What is it?
STOP. It’s not a shadow. There’s a bright spot right there. Deﬁnite variation in pixel brightness.
STOP. Bigger again. More detail. It can’t be another skimmer. Skimmers aren’t supposed to be down this low.
STOP. The skimmer must be moving towards the object. It’s big enough to show an edge.
STOP. The camera’s poor resolution makes the edge look jagged, but look past the saw-tooth pattern and you can imagine a smooth arc. Is it artiﬁcial?
STOP. Deﬁnitely light and dark patterns now. The object ﬁlls the image. The bright portion is triangular.
STOP. And then—
You stop the frame-by-frame analysis and sit back. Then you go back through it all over again, asking yourself the same question. You can almost imagine that white triangle is shaped a little like a shuttle. And in that last frame—
//Did it move?//
=Moons and Stations= 
* [[Oberon]]
* [[Titania]]
* [[Xiphos]]
* [[Ariel]]

[ [[Home]] | [[Setting Information]] | [[Places of Interest]] ]