Mothership setting notes: CRASHLAND

A LOT of this was cribbed from Throne of Salt's Great Screaming Hell and Unnamed Mothership Setting.

War in Heaven

We don't know why they fight. We fight for the castoffs, or we fight the castoffs. Our posthuman Angels rarely notice us. Their machinations are abstract and distant. Or close, next to us, inside us, destroying our worlds, our minds, our reality. We don't even know if it's a war. We just know it is destructive.

Their leavings, in part:

• Exowombs
• Warframe armor
• MTHR computer cores
• Automated nanofactories
• Infested radio waves hacking and repurposing machines and minds
• Origins of cyber brains and backups and uploading
• Jump drives - we can't create them
• Some androids

CRASHLAND

Y03D, or 'Yonder,' was meant to be a number of things. A depository of debtors working down their sentences. A mining colony. A shipbreaker facility. An out-of-the-way part of the galactic economy where exiled researchers could be parked. 

In time, the workers re-dubbed it Crashland.

The place was a ball of scree and comet-impacts orbiting a star. The Company shellacked atmosphere on it as fast as they could, leaving a few mild gaps in the high desert where there's essentially none - the ideal place to drop ancient ships to be broken and recycled, after orbital stations removed delicate parts. 

Salty seas were made from ice comets crashing into the planet. Desalination stations were set up, settlements sprouted in various places. Grasslands grew.

One had to get a cyberbrain prosthesis to move to Crashland, and modern medical facilities are still set up to convert people to such. Nanite injections can painlessly convert brain flesh to silicone, grow in the ports needed for work, entertainment, registration, anesthesia. Rumors of the company editing memories were not to be repeated; they were prosecutable examples of subversion. 

Then the Company foresaw a tiny thread of the War in Heaven drifting towards Crashland. They drew straws - or rather, the local executive board handed out straws to their lessers, and a general evacuation was sounded for 'non-essential personnel.' 

Now, a skeleton crew squats around a space elevator, nominally ruling the world. Factions vie for legitimacy, land, water. Ship remnants rain down every night. In the depths of the wilds, in the depths of the planet, from the depths of the void, old machinery left by the angels of Heaven sometimes stir. 

We pray we are not noticed by them.

The Trickle Down

Orbital decay causes old shipbroken vessels to crash down and spill their rotten guts. Often they're dropped into parts of the Crashland with little or no atmosphere. Some make a living scavenging. Others worship artifacts gleaned from the old ships.

Edited Memories

Cyberbrains installed via a technovirus, and the Company covered it up? Remote backdoors utilized by ghoulish operatives left behind to catalogue and safeguard Company secrets? Cyberbrain architecture derived from posthuman technologies? Random blackouts in some locations? Puppeteering? Mind viruses uploaded to the local internet? Brain-thief factions setting up neural networks from prisoners / captives and leasing out processing time? Hermits living isolated and alone developing cyberbrains spontaneously? Edited memories a hoax to hide breakdown in reality? Company never left and will never leave and walks among us in secret at night and we cannot see them? 

None of this is true or worth repeating.