The Oortian Community of Qhevak

Mainly distributed across various solar Oort clouds located in a roughly sixty parsec wide bubble within the deep Gamma Quadrant (Scutum–Centaurus Arm), the Decentralized Oortian Community of Qhevak (a world roughly defined as "pariah" within the language of the one of the founding species) is an loose, distributed confederation originally formed from various radical postbaseline and anarchist groups rejected from their host civilizations for various reasons. Since its founding roughly three centuries ago, the Community has drawn in large numbers of other groups, ranging from other postbaseline groups to research interests looking to perform dangerous experiments free of oversight.

=History=

The deep Scutus-Centaurus Arm region of the Gamma Quadrant of several centuries ago was considered a dangerous no-go zone by many. Relative to other galactic regions it had a relatively very high level of spacial anomalies and precursor war remnants, which gave it a reputation as an exceptionally dangerous place to establish a colony. Reports, rumors and legends of moon sized spider gods, unstoppably virulent intelligent plagues, twisted nightmare toy worlds and other things too terrible to speak of had largely deterred most settlement attempts, especially given how generally spacious the rest of the galaxy was. In reality, most of the rumors were either outright fables or much exaggerated truths, and the region provided an excellent place to stay hidden from the rest of galactic geopolitics.

The early Qhevak region was founded by the Oyuins, a philosophical and artistic movement mostly concentrated in the still thriving heartlands of Beta that viewed the distinction between reality and virtuality as meaningless. At the movement's peak, a large proportion of the Oyuins, wishing to practice their ideals free from the threat of galactic geopolitics, successfully organized and crowdfunded a project to move to a region far from civilization in order to set up their servers in peace. Flying deep into Gamma, they ultimately settled on colonizing a region of the Oort located far from any truly habitable worlds, and half a year of flight time from Beta at typical FTL speeds.

A number of other groups would follow their lead and flock to the region in the decades that followed, the Kumiho Clade the best known among them, but the region would not become more than a minor sideshow until the appearance of the Entangled Order of Saint Teilhard half a century after the initial arrival of the Oyuin. The Order were an accelerationist religion initially founded by a number of networked military intelligences in Delta, ultimately aiming for the establishment of a universal supermind which they identified with God. Fear of the long term potential of their emerging hive intelligence lead to the early Entangled Order coming under threat from the various military powers of Delta, resulting in most of the Order fleeing deep into Gamma to avoid destruction, and ultimately settling in the proto-Qhevak region.

Leveraging their networked superintelligence in conjunction with the variety of odd and inventive ideas spawned by Qhevak's existing subcultures, the Entangled Order would transform Qhevak into a very high tech, well armed hermit kingdom. While still little known among the larger galactic community, the Qhevak region began to become a Mecca for various odd galactic subcultures, causing a self-sustaining cycle of growth over the next two centuries. Outside of a few small and growing mercenary companies, contact with outside was still generally limited over that period - the most notable event was a joint operation by several major clades to blow up a nearby gate construction attempt by the exploitative Hermes Hyperspace Transportation Corporation which had monopolized long distance interstellar transport in older times.

The Community was first marked by conflict with the Missionary Conflict (also known as the First Qhevak Civil War) of 1802, resulting from a breakaway sect of the Entangled Order. While the majority of the Order aimed for the very long game, aiming to gradually and consensually grow their numbers while establishing technological galactic dominance over the next few millenia, the Missionary Faction was a covert group aiming for more rapid assimilation. A relatively small part of the Order initially, the Missionary faction was not broadly known until they launched simultaneous and large scale memetic viral attacks on Qhevaki interhab networks, using an advanced viral strain taken from an alien artifact in deep Gamma. Assimilating an estimate of 4 percent of the Community's population at the time, the faction attempted to attain further memetic dominance over the rest of the Community, while using coordination to initially outmaneuver hab militia defenders. The conflict was ultimately ended by a combination of the remaining Entangled Order, who had infiltrated Missionary groups pre-conflict more than they had realized, and various hab militias, including the early Kumiho clade combat synthmorphs, who's somewhat bestial intelligences proved to be quite resiliant to the particular strain of memetic attack.

Groups within the Oortian Community began to launch a number of exploratory missions into even deeper Gamma during this period, uncovering regions long ignored by other galactic politics. Aside from uncovering a number of precursor civilization artifacts which raised further questions about galactic history and coming into conflict with certain dangerous entities, they would come into contact with a number of new civilizations in deeper Gamma, such as the Speirei Conclaves.

Things began to change fifty years ago. With increasing settlement of the Scutum-Centaurus Gamma region by assorted pioneers, it quickly became clear that most of the rumored horrors in the region were either non-existent or long gone. Settlement snowballed thereafter into an outright colonization boom, with public perception of deep Gamma quickly switching from "nightmare hellscape" to "galactic gold-rush boomtown". While the initial bubble burst after a few decades and Qhevak's location on the galactic periphery meant it wasn't greatly touched by the first settlement wave, galactic recognition of Qhevak rose greatly thereafter, as did economic interest in various Qhevakian innovations. With the establishment of the Aetin-2 wormhole linking the Moria region to the Gamma-Alpha border (the only one publically in operation, though it's an open secret that the Entangled Order has wormholes of their own), and thereby to broader galaxy spanning wormhole networks, economic links between Qhevak and the broader galactic community have boomed, leading to great resistance from Community old guard looking to "keep Qhevak weird".

=Demographics=

Clades

 * See Main Article: Major Clades of Qhevak.

The largest power groups outside of Hab administration are Clades, groups of posthumans with similar shared ideology, goals and interests. Many Clades operate their own habitats, and a few are large enough to qualify as superpowers in their own right. In contrast to the common external perception of the Community as freewheeling anarchists, Qhevaki Clades are typically very communitarian, dedicated to strong ideological tenants and often borderline cultish and/or traditionalist, a feature heightened by common use of mass-mind swarm intelligence software. While leaving is possible at any time, those born within ideological clades are often specifically engineered to work within them, and exiting is rare in practice - though generally more common within the less overtly posthuman clades.

Morphs

 * See Main Article: Common Morphs in Qhevak.

Given it's posthumanist politics Qhevak's citizens take a wide variety of forms. Classes of common bodily forms are generally referred to as "Morphs" in the region.

More conventional bioforms such as nearbaseline humans are the most visible residents of most habs in Qhevak, but are also the least relevant to broader society. While a bioform can still do useful work to a degree (similar to hobby farms and traditional craftsmen in modern society), for the most part they are irrelevant relative to networked AGI collectives which, while sometimes coming into the open in the form of mechs, are mostly resident within the dense computronium cores of habs. Capable of operating at thousands of times faster than human minds, these tend to increasingly diverge from humanity over time, often becoming integrated into the broader group mind to the point of losing most individuality.

=Politics= Qhevak largely lacks any form of official government outside of individual/small clusters of habitats, being bonded largely by shared interest, mutual defense and economic necessity. Most governance, where it does exist, is limited to within space habitats, which can have populations ranging from one or two people to several billion. The form of these habitats can range widely, from classical rotating cylinder and torus habs to clusters of modules to zero gravity comet beehives to massive clusters of sim servers.

Governance systems vary just as widely, ranging from total free-for-alls to authoritarian oligarchies, though the latter are rare. Most habs tend to have a more moderate sort of anarchy, with traditional centralized governance being replaced with policy making via networked swarm intelligence mediated by software. More extreme forms of dictatorship are largely tapped down on via the Exit Rights Protocol, agreed to as a necessary component to joining the Community as a full member, which requires habs to either freely let their citizens leave upon request or be forced to by militia intervention. Similar protocols serve to regulate threats of inter-hab externalities via unrestrained memetic contamination or self-replication.

Interhab disputes and Exit Rights Protocol compliance are largely managed by Consensus, a distributed inter-habitat swarm intelligence participated in by representatives of most habs and major clades. Once Consensus has approved a habitat's Community membership, other Clade militias are required to come to it's defense when attacked per mutual defense protocol, and it becomes able to take party in the other, less global treaties agreed upon by various Community habs. Consensus also aids in the provision of independent habitats to groups lacking the resources to acquire them otherwise, within reasonable limits.

The enabling of effective mass swarm intelligence via brain machine interface telepathy has lead to traditional top-down control structures becoming largely obsolete - networked swarms can integrate information faster and more deeply with a greatly shortened OODA loop. Most swarms still keep their members separate enough to maintain a level of individuality, though some, particularly the Entangled Order, have fully abandoned their self-identity for a greater level of integration into the networked superintelligence of their swarm.

Military

 * See Main Article: Modern Space Warfare.
 * See Main Article: Modern Ground Warfare.
 * See Main Article: Major Military Organizations in Qhevak.

Qhevak has no common military - defense is provided by a wide variety of heavy armed militias operated by various habs and clades, as well a number of private military companies which serve as Qhevak's most widely seen military representative on the galactic stage. As with government, swarm intelligence allows modern militaries to be extremely decentralized, rendering them extremely resilient relative to their predecessors.

Law Enforcement
Individual habitats in the Community operate their own systems of law and enforcement, varying widely in strength and kind. Internal laws can be set as a habitat wishes, as long as the habitat does not forbid exit on request. Naturally this allows those accused and tried of a crime in one habitat to simply leave and find another where the crime in question is not illegal, though this does have stipulations - attempting to bring property legally classified as stolen across habitat lines is not allowed by Consensus. Additionally, given the broad illegality of murder in most habs, the only place convicted murderers have to turn if they wish to roam free is habitats in which they will be constantly under fire from military grade ordnance wielded by other open PvPers - therefore most will simply accept a sentence in a hab to their liking. Prison as a sentence is uncommon - the typical sentence for serious crimes is simply to have a specialized automated "slap drone" follow them around and keep them from doing anything illegal until they show suitable rehabilitation.

In addition, certain activities are considered broadly illegal by Consensus as a whole, and all habitats are required to enforce them. These include:


 * A number of particularly destructive crimes, including habitat destruction and genocide require prison or slap droning until rehabilitation regardless of habitat.
 * Operating a spacecraft belonging to an Orange List organisation (this includes a number of militaristic powers including all states of the Human Compact) within Community space requires immediate interception by available militia craft and forced exit at gunpoint.
 * Operating a spacecraft belonging to a Red List organisation (this includes the Order of Disorder, Drecha and aggressive homogenizing powers such as the Weld) within Community space requires immediate interception and weapons-free engagement by available militia craft.

=Economy=

Qhevak necessarily has no one standard economic system due to it's decentralization. In general most habs tend to use a form of cybernetic planning for managing most necessary production, using decentralized computer networks to calculate required future manufacturing and distribution using inputs from the citizen swarm intelligence. Many of the larger habs and clades are part of various economic alliances enabling mutually beneficial coordinated planning and free trade. Atomically precise nanotech manufacturing allows cheap onsite manufacturing - trade is therefore mostly relegated to raw materials, very large constructs such as interstellar spacecraft and information, which also serves to greatly simplify economic planning.

Market economics is mostly done at the margins by groups of citizens, both as a game and for trading goods outside of the Oortian Community, and typically makes use of proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies. Actually making significant profit off market trading within the Community is extremely difficult, as a combination of low entry barriers, minimal marginal production costs with APM and huge numbers of buyers and sellers creates an environment of near-perfect competition - the resulting near-zero rate of profit was one of the largest factors leading to the rise of cybernetic planning in posthuman economies.

Most habs are capable of performing full closed cycle recycling via a mix mass spectrometer sorting and nanotech - combined with nanoassemblers capable of independently producing all necessities a typical habitat is capable of operating fully self-sufficiently as long as it has power, which is near-indefinitely with abundant fusion from comet-mined deuterium. This enables a wide range of societal divergence, with individual communities being able to operate without care to the wishes of broader society.

=Habitation=
 * See Main Article: Space Habitation in Qhevak.
 * See Main Article: Major Space Habitats in Qhevak.

The majority of Qhevak's citizens live on large space habitats, typically near or attached to Oort Cloud comets which are used as a source of resources.

=Culture=