Home-level Technology

Imperial citizens are the products of genetic engineering that has given them an array of attractive skin, hair, and eye colors, bodies free from heritable illness or defects, and eternal youth.

Despite their young bodies, citizens are susceptible to a type of mental aging known as crystallization. The crystallizing mind becomes incapable of encompassing new experiences or registering new memories, growing ever more mechanical in its reactions. Victims customarily are euthanized after failing competency hearings.

Physical injuries are healed in special chemical pools known as wonderdomes. A dead body that hasn't suffered extensive decay or Deep-level damage can be refloated; that is, restored to life. Wonderdomes can also be used for physical enhancements or genetic alteration, as well as for mental healing.

Citizens who have not yet lived for ten thousand years are entitled to purchase copy insurance. If they die, a copy will be floated and primed with the life memories they have stored with the copy insurance commpany.

Imperial artifacts, furniture, clothing, and buildings are customarily animated by glowworms, a living nanomachine that can be bred and programmed for innumerable tasks.

Glowworms can be embedded in the human body as communications devices (internal links) or tools. All well-to-do citizens, except for Deep-level pilots, have internals both for communications and for cognitive augmentation. Pilots don't use them because downleveling generally purges them from the body as tissues transform to Deep-level stuff and then return to Home-level form. Young people are not permitted their first internal until they reach the Minimum Age of Adult Citizenship at twenty imperial years. This is to give them the chance to develop learning and memory skills with an unaugmented brain. Controversy about the degree to which such skills should be managed by glowworms continues.

Citizens are unaccustomed to a glowworm-free life and find objects unresponsive to their wishes strange and disconcerting. Because of the pervasiveness of glowworms, the occasional plagues that strike them are major disasters for citizens.

Free-flying glowworms are called fireflies. They are used to produce colorful ads in the air, or to convey messages when no direct link is available.

Glowworms can be assembled into entities resembling humans or other lifeforms. These programmable resources are known as bioids. Nearly every company in the Empire uses bioids to perform mindless tasks from customer service to freight loading.

There has been much controversy throughout imperial history about whether bioids can be considered sentient. Because their behavior is restricted by error-correction that prunes away unwanted responses down to the subatomic scale, a bioid is always completely predictable. According to Mindsea Academy Headmistress Vedina: "The subjective experience of choice comes about because a living mind may be reconstituted in more than one configuration after each quantum refresh. Awareness momentarily enfolds all of those possibilities before the timelines branch and a single configuration predominates. That is why it is said that all living beings have a Deep-level component and cannot be entirely Deep-blind.

"A bioid can only emerge from quantum refresh in a single state dictated by its programming, and therefore does not experience a succession of 'nows' in which choices can be made. Though its tiny constituents do experience quantum fluctuations, it is not designed to respond to these fluctuations. Any uncertainty in the outcome of its processing would be considered a flaw, and is strongly guarded against. In the wake of the Cataclysm, vast numbers of bioids were destroyed because they had developed flaws that would have made them unpredictable and possibly dangerous. But only a flawed bioid can be sentient."

Most of the furniture in imperial homes consists of nooks, soft, adjustable seats composed of glowworms. The material conforms to the user's body, and can also be adjusted to accommodate different numbers of people.

The various styles of nooks are named after letters of the alphabet.

The various styles of nooks are named after letters of the alphabet.

Recorded data that needs to be distributed across the galaxy without alteration is often stored on memory buttons which will be carried aboard Deep-level ships in special shipping containers that protect their contents from downleveling. Buttons are also used for personal communications between citizens. When a button is used for the transfer of credits, it is called a credit button.

Imperial citizens reproduce by having fireflies combine their genetic material and inserting the resulting zygote into an incubator from which their child will emerge when ready to walk and talk. The parents may be a man and a woman, two women or two men, or even more than two people. Interspecies reproduction is also possible, once laboratory glowworms have snipped and woven the genetic contributions of the parents into a form that can produce a viable zygote.

Airlifters are the ubiquitous form of personal transportation for any distance too long to comfortably walk and short compared to a planetary circumference. Airlifters are formed by an invisible cloud of fireflies that adjust the properties of air molecules to provide lift and propulsion. They are usually provided with a weatherscreen to protect the rider from collisions or falling, though the weatherscreen can be turned off. Once the rider indicates the desired destination, the airlifter finds the route, flying high enough to avoid obstacles and other traffic.

For distances considered short for an airlifter ride, there may be moving walkways. Inside buildings there are zip floors and airshifts.

For distances considered too great for airlifters, there are sky-buses that do not leave the planetary atmosphere, and space shuttles or space-planes that do.

The weather of nearly every planet requires some tweaking to make it optimal for human enjoyment. Trillions of fireflies flit through the atmosphere, devouring bad chemicals and releasing good chemicals. Atmospheric rivers are adjusted to insure the proper amounts of rainfall, and winds channeled to produce pleasant temperatures.

When a planet or inhabited moon is too small to easily sustain an atmosphere, or when a separate, specialized climate zone is desired, a weatherdome can be inflated.