The twin capitals of Eridani, it is subject to being the “baseline” of people’s ideas of Eridani as a whole. Tall office blocks stretch into the sky, connected by walkways. The smog is so irreversibly powerful that windows do not open except in older buildings that were made before corporate regulations governing smog contamination were put in place. Dregs face a similar conundrum while living in the underground caverns of the sector, formerly mining operations. Here, shanty towns and pools of acidic chemical runoff characterise a rough life for dregs. Criminal gangs will occasionally surface to commit crimes in corporate territory before retreating.
The Eridani Corporate Alliance, often referred to as Eridani for short, is a series of relatively independent Solarian systems that enjoy almost total economic and relative military freedom from the rest of the alliance of states that forms Sol. Eridani can instead be considered a form of special economic zone that exists due to its convenience for the rest of the Spur, which in turn allows the corporations within to largely skirt past criticisms of their human rights violations and caste system by virtue of being economically beneficial to the rest of the Orion Spur.
History
Originally sold for the purposes of establishing a port and warehouse to Charon Shipping Services in 2203, initial surveys of Epsilon Eridani appeared grim for profit. Only one planet was confirmed to have existed, the gas giant Aegir with a sole moon. While another planet was theorised, upon arrival this was proven not to be the case, however a much more important discovery was made by the Charon Eridani Fleet: The moon of Aegir was, in fact, habitable. A rudimentary biosphere had led to an atmosphere equivalent to the top of a tall mountain, ever-so-slightly thinner than average.
With this discovery came immediate colonisation by Charon, who in turn contacted numerous notable corporations with the intent to sell plots of land, mineral rights and shipping services. Many historians theorise that this was done in an attempt to legitimise the relative newcomer to space amongst its new peers, as well as create ties that would form the foundation of the new system’s unique status in Spur-level politics.
While initially colonised with the intent to be owned by Charon Shipping Services, the growing corporatocracy quickly found itself growing too large and complex for a single, relatively junior corporation to effectively manage. While logistics may have been the speciality of Charon, they lacked the political clout or hard power to enforce their claim upon the planet. In their place, and to avoid the minor skirmishes between security forces related to various corporations that were beginning to erupt in 2228, The Council of Eight was formed. This council of eight positions, dictated by the ownership of regions of land on the moon of Aegir, became the de-facto government for the planetoid.
Over time, The Council of Eight has had a series of small scale wars erupt between corporations for the seats of power in which it contains, with vast swathes of land being economically repurposed in arbitrary treaties that the inhabitants had little to no say in. To combat this turmoil, eventually The Council of Eight elected that positions are eternal, and may only be opened through either purchase or the forced removal of a seat by a unanimous vote of all other council seats. The last time the seats changed was in 2490, giving the largely run-down southern arctic region of District 8 to Einstein Engines. This transfer was met with controversy from much of the dreg population, with fears of the heating infrastructure going even further unmaintained under new leadership leading to a borderline revolution.
During what is now referred to as the Thermostat Revolution, the transfer of power between Einstein Engines and Zeng-Hu collapsed due to the total lack of military power owned by either corporation. In an attempt to prevent the budding revolution from potentially spreading further, the corporations that made up The Council of Eight put aside their differences temporarily, redirecting every mercenary group under their employment to suppress riots, arrest organisers and violently put down the revolution in such a manner that any non-corporate entity would be brought up on various human rights violations. Following this, The Council of Eight voted unanimously to create a semi-regulated body for the employment of mercenaries, who in times of no-contract would act as the de-facto military for the Eridanus Cluster.
“The modern Eridani Corporate Alliance is not too alien from the Corporate Alliance of the past, in a form of simultaneous stagnation and inflation. The more things change, the more entrenched certain conventions become; dregs remain the oppressed underclass, corporates remain in splendour and the corporations that influence every aspect of life become nations unto the worker. The Thermostat Revolution may soon become a distant memory, rather than a cultural touchstone of the Dreg Worker.” - Julian Bertrand, Philosopher and Economist, 2540
Government
Eridani’s government is largely represented by the Council of Eight - Eight representatives from various megacorporations. Each seat in the Council is tied to a sector, which the chairman’s corporation has full control over. While discussions have been made in the past to expand the number of sectors, this naturally has not come to fruition out of fears of decreased power on the moon. Each sector has also been given an informal name to make conversation easier. Currently, each sector is assigned to the following corporations:
Sector 1 (Luxembourg) - Idris Incorporated
Sector 2 (Canaria) - Hephaestus Industries
Sector 3 (Monaco) - Idris Incorporated
Sector 4 (Panama) - Charon Shipping Services
Sector 5 (Trinidad) - Hephaestus Industries
Sector 6 (Grenada) - EPMC - Zavodskoi Interstellar joint venture
Sector 7 (Seychelles) - Zeng-Hu Pharmaceuticals
Sector 8 (Faroe) - Einstein Engines
Sectors
Due to Epsilon Eridani’s long history of being terraformed and shaped to the whims of the colonists, the vast majority of the moon has similar streets and architecture styles. Industrial land seamlessly mixes with offices and apartments with very little rhyme or reason to much of it in regions where there is a high dreg population, meanwhile corporates enjoy well organised and sectioned off districts dedicated to work or leisure that stretch for kilometres. Despite this, each sector has a unique reputation and general environment that both the under and upper classes would be able to notice.
One of the major centres of tourism in Epsilon Eridani. The reputation of the moon of Aegir has spread far and wide throughout the Orion Spur, and with it comes tourists seeking to confirm or deny the rumours of the planet. Idris has transformed this region into a vast tourist haven, a cloying and romanticised version of the public perception of Eridani. In the eyes of tourists visiting Monaco, it is said that anything goes, and all manner of services, products and monuments can be found so long as you look hard enough. For the families there are the glamorous, bizarre and outright gimmicky tourist attractions of the main streets, immediately outside the hotels and surrounded by the dazzling lights of advertising, neon signs and flying billboards that pollute the sky with the incessant need to call attention to products. For the faux-bohemian, however, Idris has not neglected their wants, with an entire carefully managed and well patrolled dreg “slum” for them to visit. complete with faux dive bars and carefully managed waste in the road, any tourist that were to visit this sector would come out feeling as if they had seen the real Eridani, without ever having gone within 100 miles of actual danger, serving double time as a tourist attraction and smokescreen to the plight of the dregs. In amongst the splendour of the main tourist region and the artificial roughness of the disdainfully named “Dreg Village” comes what many actually visit Eridani for, the so-called Epsilon High-way. A single multi-mile long stretch of drugs, drink and vice arcs across the centre of Monaco, capturing the attention of passers by with graphic depictions of what products they offer.
This sector is one of the lesser talked about areas, having little importance other than as a docking station for large ships and cargo. The underground hosts an extremely large and dense network of warehouses, and one of the densest populations of dregs in Epsilon Eridani in order to staff it. Despite this, subsidiaries of Charon Shipping Services are still likely to bring workers in from outside of the region due to a general distrust of undermotivated dregs around valuable cargo. The sector is characterised by hostile wildlife in slums and streets alike, with a species of cross-bred rat being known to attack small children if left unattended. The environment itself is famously windy, the narrow corridors of buildings acting as wind tunnels that cause dangerous gales during storms. Instead of fixing this, wind shelters the size of a 21st century bus shelter have been installed along roads to shelter in during wind storms. Due to these factors, the region has been not so affectionately named “The Hurricane” by dregs who live there.
Located directly next to Panama, Trinidad is the industrial heart of the Eridani Corporate Council. The surface is smeared with refineries belching smog into the sky as underground rail transports produced goods to and from the warehouses of Panama. Mirroring its sister sector, Trinidad has a majority dreg population that lives in squalor around the factories they work in, either in shanty towns constructed between buildings or company towns that work on scrip pay and slum-like conditions. Many observers theorise that these company towns are a method of control that has prevented further workers rights movements from truly taking off in the system, forcing dregs to risk their food supply alongside their homes in order to take any form of industrial action. In comparison, reinstated and corporate managers are allowed to make use of the extensive rail network underneath this region, letting them arrive directly at their workplace with little to no exposure to the outside smog or squalid conditions of their subordinates.
Forged in an agreement created by the lacking political capital of Zavodskoi Interstellar and the sudden need for a centralised base of operations for the newly developed Eridani Private Military Corporation, the formerly underdeveloped region of Grenada has developed over the past hundred years into a hub for weapons production, military training and electronic warfare development. The vast majority of the population are either reinstated, corporate or from outside of the system. While the region is technically contested between numerous mercenary groups, it has become possibly the safest region in Eridani, following the “Clean Front Door” doctrine of mercenary groups. Quality of life is higher here than the majority of Eridani, if still notably lower than the living standards of much of the Orion Spur.
The science and research hub of Epsilon Eridani, Seychelles boasts the environment of being carved into the ice of the Northern Pole of the moon. While other regions may feel as if they are tunnels between the large skyscrapers, Seychelles is quite literally made of tunnels to survive the cold environment outside of them. With an average surface temperature of -40 degrees celsius on the surface, the cold air is ideal for running the server farms required for 26th century research and saves immense money on cooling. These tunnels are little more than bare, carved stone in many places, however closer to the universities that litter this region of the moon metal plating has been installed so as to not offend the sensibilities of the students and researchers. Dregs, primarily making up the staffing of the day to day running of these facilities, face an entirely different conundrum. Heating is not universal to all tunnels, and while corporates may enjoy a steady 20 degrees celsius all year round, abandoned tunnels inhabited by the dregs face an average temperature of -10 degrees C and can plummet to -40 in the event of a breach.
A recent acquisition, Faroe is in an unusual position compared to other sectors of Eridani. Despite the incredibly small number of manual labour positions, the sector has a large dreg population remaining from the period before Einstein Engines’ ownership of the sector. The vast majority of these dregs are homeless, living in communes situated within abandoned ex-Zeng Hu facilities making a living either selling scrap parts to pay for heating or scavenging for heating sources that still have valid DRM. Being the data centre of the communications giant’s Sol presence, Faroe takes advantage of the Southern Pole’s equally low temperatures to cool server racks for data farming and processing. The prior factors mix into a cocktail that results in Faroe being the centre of cyber-crime in Epsilon Eridani, with disenfranchised dregs who possess the necessary skills selling corporate secrets across all sectors after gathering data from in-person access to Einstein Engines servers. This culture of hacking has birthed legends of dreg folklore, including the infamous hacker Mairo Oku Mpu, who gained attention in 2587 for leaking classified Zavodskoi surveillance data.
Outside of the populated moon is an uncontrolled span of stations all across the Eridanus Cluster. These stations do not come under the Council of Eight and are laws unto themselves unless otherwise stated. The vast majority of these stations are owned by megacorporations and their subsidiaries, but older stations may be sold to individuals or simply stolen by groups with the intent to start their own enterprises. Stations therefore come in all shapes and sizes, serving different purposes and being governed under different policies. The common thread connecting every station, however, is their precarious position in the system. While stations may be officially owned by megacorporations or small private enterprises, hostile takeovers and piracy run rampant in the far less militarised regions of the Eridanus Constellation, and refugees fleeing from one station to another is not an uncommon sight anywhere in the Constellation.
One of the major industries of the stations is resource extraction, either with skiffs designed to scoop gases from gas giants across the many systems or miner drones intended to pick every last mineral out of the asteroid belts of said gas giants. Other stations provide services such as rest stops, refuelling and repairs, with many artisanal shipyards making their home in Eridani with the intent to avoid copyright laws or heavy taxation implemented by corporate controlled governments to suppress competition. Of course, for any economic hub that is sprawling and decentralised, there is crime. Pirates and extortion rings run rampant, forming a noticeable percent of the GDP of Eridani as they refuel in less-than-reputable stations and take advantage of the low police and military presence to commit piracy, making use of Bluespace Interdictors in order to violently jerk ships out of bluespace travel and into dead space, shaking them down for the contents of their cargo hold before running away.
Due to the age of some of these stations, a noticeable population of offworlders exist of both the dreg and corporate variety. Roughly a quarter of the stations that exist in these systems are older than effective gravity generation, and as such either operate on the rotating wheel method of gravity generation or simply are free-floating. This makes a cottage industry of station tourism available to offworlders across the spur, run mostly by enterprising individuals and corporates who wish to strike out and start a “new” business under the Idris banner, in some ways making Eridani one of the most popular tourist locations with offworlders across the spur. Many of the dreg offworlders often consider themselves more offworlder than dreg, leading to many a cultural clash when meeting with dregs from gravity-laden stations.Housing
The commonly studied marvel of Eridanian engineering is the Corporate Habitation Block, referred to as “Habs” for short. Where regulation does not exist, convention thrives, and one can find convention to have taken a tight grip onto the common Hab. A mixture of office building, residential housing and commercial venture, the average corporate worker may never have to leave their specific block for their entire life, assuming they never have to attend an important meeting. The average habitation block consists of a floor by floor plan spread out over the largest plot of land that the construction company could purchase, sometimes at the cost of existing structures. While a lower floor may be a series of residential pods for data input specialists, secretaries and the other numerous rabble of the lowest echelons of the corporate ladder, and the floor above it the offices in which they infest during the rat race, the centre levels may become livable two, perhaps even three room apartments made cheap by their less than desirable position directly under nightclub or over the top of the ever-loud server rooms of the office corporate machine. Naturally, the palatial penthouses, adjacent to indoor gardens, community gyms and even having the rare luxury of natural sunlight weaving between the lattices of the complimentary air-vehicle garage sold inclusive, being the most coveted and expensive examples of Eridanian housing, are reserved for the most elite of the corporate world. Regional managers, CEOs’ second homes, the functional royalty of the corporate state which has been built across Eridani.
Lesser known to the outside world, but infamous to those aware of the true realities of Eridani, are the varieties of slums across the moon of Aegir. Most commonly are semi-permanent mountains of structures, stacked one atop the other in what can only be described as a game of jenga played with mortar and steel, affectionately nicknamed “Kowloons” after a 20th century structure of an almost identical nature. These structures occupy plots of land in which the ownership is either entirely disputed or the original owner cannot be located, providing safety from private property laws by virtue of angered parties either not existing or being too-long tied into legal battles to care about what is currently on the land. These structures are even denser than the densest of Habs, with entire families living in single rooms and businesses that pull separate functions at different times of day. Schools may become casinos at night, or restaurants may operate as a dentist during the day. The layout of these buildings can only be described as a rats’ nest, with narrow and winding tunnels leading deep within the artificially lit structure so far that it is not unheard of for outsiders to never be seen again after entering, presumed either dead or kidnapped. While living conditions may be of sub-human quality, there is a sense of community in these slums that is not experienced in corporate housing, and some reinstated dregs may privately express that they miss this sense of community. This community will not always last, however, and it is not unheard of for communities to be split apart by raids, entire slums emptied in weeks in order to facilitate the construction of future corporate housing or factories.
Other dregs take a more radical approach to housing, opting to occupy empty higher-tier apartments en-masse instead of risking the crime, disease and squalor of the slums. These squatters are almost always those with the least to lose, either a part of gangs or outright unemployed, and often form the vanguard that establishes longer lasting squats-turned-communities. This is much riskier for longevity compared to the slum, with squats often being cleared by corporate security in a matter of months. These squats have been known to last years, however, and some even decades, as veritable fortresses under siege deep within corporate territory. Some of these squats have entered the annals of dreg folklore, becoming rumoured safe havens or dens of legendary outlaws.
Society
Work
Eridani forms what can only be described as a culture of pure work, with one’s job being the centre of their existence regardless of caste or class. Eridanians exist to work, and every aspect of culture is related back to the creation of value, the creation of wealth specifically. In the case of corporates, this is taken much more directly and manifests in hobbies having to be monetised, stress relief being a weak excuse for enjoying but a select few societally shared hobbies, and every waking hour is expected to be taken in the pursuit of wealth and power to some extent. This is less so in the case of dregs and some reinstated, who are more likely to take leisure in activities but are forced more by circumstances to monetise hobbies they hold actual skill in simply to make ends meet. Work culture in Eridani is considered toxic by the vast majority of the Spur, and even the most hardline of bootstrap mentality may baulk at the hours, or the absolute lack of overtime pay.
A Caste System
The one thing that everybody knows about the Eridanus Constellation is the system of classification that is functionally a caste system, wherein the status of “Corporate Citizen” is only granted to those who are employed by the corporations or client corporations of the Council of Eight.Those who are citizens enjoy full rights within the Eridani Corporate Council, however few those actually are, but this is dependent entirely on their remaining employed without more than a month’s gap between jobs at any point. Those who fail to stay employed in an office job are stripped of their citizenship, and if they choose to remain residents shall become of an entirely lower caste, forced to work in manual labour or not at all. This secondary caste are known as dregs, and while having the official name of non-citizens, their nickname holds much more power as both a derogatory term amongst corporates and a term of personal pride and empowerment amongst dregs. It is not uncommon for dregs to quote the immortal words from the trial of Shock Namkoisse, “I’m a dreg, you call me one behind my back, call me one to my face[...]”, when referred to as a “non-citizen”.
Between the corporate and the dreg is the reinstated, a somewhat temporary or probationary period between going back from dreg to corporate. People may be reinstated in two ways, becoming the conduit between management and the ground floor workers, typically as workplace managers or secretaries, or through coming under direct employment of a member of the corporate class. While the former may simply be a career in being a shift manager or foreman, the latter is on a much higher risk-reward relationship, with reinstated employees of corporates often being their personal mercenaries and wetworks teams of their employers. While reinstated “goons” may take much more risk, they have the potential to make great gains with their employer, and many find themselves retiring into comfy security management positions under their employer should they survive.
Referred to as corporates by the vast majority, citizens enjoy the most rights out of any of their fellow Eridanians. Their citizenship is tied entirely to their work, and as such a unique work culture persists, described by some as horrific in nature. The most major tenet, and the most famous, is the cutthroat nature of office politics within corporate culture, both metaphorically and literally. While at the lowest levels the likelihood of promotion is almost entirely tied to hours worked, eventually worked hours plateau in effectiveness and the only method of upwards movement is conspiracy, sabotage or loyalty to another person who excels in these fields. The highest echelons of corporate life have only ever achieved their positions through climbing a blood soaked ladder all the way to the top, and more often than not have added their fair share of blood to the rungs. Despite this, the status of the lowest corporates should not be confused with the situation of the highest up corporates, and to an extent lower on the corporate ladder is almost entirely devoid of bloodshed outside of the most ambitious of candidates, even if this difference is not normally recognised by those who have not lived within the corporate lifestyle of Eridani.
Corporate life is often defined as long periods of work punctuated by rest and burnout, and this is by-and-large true for the low to middle echelons, with working hours reaching 12 hours a day on the regular and breaks being few and far between. These long working hours have led to an increasingly ready-made lifestyle amongst corporate citizens, with many basic skills being reduced to hobbies or sold in premade end results. Stimulant abuse is one of the leading causes of non-violent death in the Eridanus Cluster. Despite all of this, control of one’s life does not only extend to work, and corporates often end up seeing themselves criticised for not spending their limited time calling family, or taking part in the handful of hobbies that are seen as acceptable for bonding with fellow co-workers. While familial relations are not exactly close by the standards of the rest of the spur, they are usually the closest relationship that corporates will have while living within the borders of Eridani. Relationships are usually relegated to the workplace otherwise, with romantic relationships often quickly turning to marriage for added benefits from the employer, as well as the ability to finally talk privately with a person without arousing suspicion. The divorce rate in Eridani is 65%.
Hobbies-wise, corporates only have a handful of cultural touchstones they share, primarily football (soccer) as games can be discussed in the office as an icebreaker, as well as video games, crosswords and drinking for pleasure. The final one is the most important, with much of Eridanian free time being spent heading to the bar with their coworkers and attempting to drink one another under the table, with the expectation that everybody stay at least as long as their manager, who in turn is expected to stay for as long as they can still walk home, ending in a standoff situation with their co-workers.
Corporates are heavily augmented, with the first augments often being tracheal implants intended to make breathing easier in the stagnant air of the lower floors of their hab block easier. Largely, augments are subsidised by their employer, ranging from ocular implants to improve productivity to typing-optimised prosthetic hands intended to avoid the drop in productivity of RSI before it can even begin, augments that can’t be removed are docked from the final paycheck when an employee leaves the company. The relationship with their roboticist is the most crucial one that a corporate can have, not only because they must truly trust their roboticist to avoid assassination while under the knife, but also due to a true cultural belief that anybody who you trust with your body is a friend. While some anthropologists theorise that this is a result of such isolation in corporate culture that even casual relationships become strong, others theorise that it may be instead a result of cultural bleedover from dregs who were reinstated into corporate life.As with all things, the relationship between dregs and corporates is not black and white, and there are those who have ambitions to escape the slums and become corporates, either believing that even a coffin hotel is better than their current living conditions or that they can advance to middle management or even beyond. These people are referred to as “reinstated”, typically with varying levels of venom from dregs and varying levels of disdain from higher up corporates.
Reinstateds are the intermediate period between a dreg and a corporate, being treated as a trial period in which they prove their loyalty to the corporation over their former communities. There are two methods in which this can be done, through either being promoted to a position that connects corporate management to the working dreg population such as supervisor, or through taking advantage of their dubious societal position to become effectively personal mercenaries for a corporate, on the understanding that they will be given a position immediately under their corporate sponsor once their position is no longer of use. The former is much more common than the latter, however covert work is far from uncommon as a method of reinstatement.
The more mundane of the two is naturally a promotion. Positions of power are usually only handed to dregs on the understanding that they are already of an exceptional loyalty to the company, rather than out of competence in their role. Promotions may range from managerial positions over other manual labourers to secretaries to document mules, typically positions at the absolute bottom of the corporate ladder, if still on the corporate ladder at all compared to their former position. These positions are typically the least popular in their workplace, either being seen as beneath their corporate colleagues or as sell-outs and potential rats by dreg subordinates. These attitudes lead to the majority of attempted reinstatements failing, with this path of reinstatement often exposing even the most stoic of dregs’ breaking points as they lose the vast majority of their friends and even family, that which had been so important to them before, to their ambitions. Failed reinstatements are often forgiven, however, and regularly return to a comfortable familiarity. Some anthropologists theorise that this is the true cause of the lack of class mobility, rather than the architecture of the system itself.
Standard reinstatement is not entirely negative, however, and successful reinstatements often find themselves office celebrities, invited to their managers’ parties to entertain guests with novel skills such as cooking for guests from scratch, mixing cocktails and anecdotes of slum life. Many describe their early career as being more of a circus, and yet the most advantageous position of their lives as they are granted the opportunity to network with much more powerful individuals and potentially secure a promotion before the novelty of their existence wears off.
There is, however, a faster method of climbing ranks without needing to be explicitly subservient or working in an unpopular position, all at the cost of a much higher risk to life. This is the world of corporate covert operations, typically referred to as “wet works”, in which reinstated are held to a contract on the understanding that they will help their sponsor advance their career at any cost. Depending on one’s sponsor, this could be any illicit job from bodyguard to hacker to thief to assassin. The system typically follows the format that the reinstated in question will be a member of their sponsor’s entourage up until either their sponsor dismisses them and recruits them into their corporate team, or their sponsor dies and they are sent back to square one. These wet works teams often never truly retire, being called back in to assist with their former sponsor’s problems under pain of the acts they committed during their tenure being revealed to their new manager, however accepting these callings will almost always result in promotion. This lifestyle is often considered by many to be that of only the most ambitious potential corporates, those who have no interest in bowing down and who crave only the power of position.
Historically, before EPMC took over at the functional police force of the ECA, wet works reinstated filled the role of enforcers for the will of the corporate holders of the region, tackling potential revolutionary groups and crime syndicates that were causing trouble for their sponsors in surgical strikes. Famously, the personal bodyguards of the Einstein Engines representative to the Corporate Alliance were reinstated from Faroe who foiled an assassination attempt.Despite being a largely service based economy, The Eridani Corporate Alliance requires immense amounts of manual labour to maintain food security, cleanliness and internal manufacturing. To fill this niche, the dreg caste makes up roughly half of the planet’s population according to censuses, but estimates from humanitarian organisations claim that the population is more on the end of 60 to 65% of the planet’s population, when accounting for the internal dreg economy. A combination of extreme deprivation, more people than jobs and an almost total lack of patrols from EPMC peacekeepers has led to the vast majority of the economy within dreg settlements being under the control of organised crime. Be the shop owned by these organisations, or simply forced to pay protection money, there is not a lot of land that is independent of these pseudo-governmental syndicates within a typical Kowloon, not even accommodation. Despite this criminal incentive for profit, a loyal population benefits these gangs infinitely more, and as such living conditions are usually more spacious than the low-level corporate coffin hotels, instead having enough room for a bed, wardrobe and perhaps some shelves, even if bathrooms and toilets are shared to a hallway or even a floor.
The day-to-day life of a dreg can be considered rather varied in comparison to the average 8 to 10 worker of Epsilon Eridani, however this should not be confused with comfort or freedom. Variety comes in problems, primarily lacking work but also sudden loss of power at home, oxygenators breaking or food running out faster than expected. All of these can send a dreg out to purchase, scavenge or steal the necessary parts and equipment to solve their problems, leading to either reliance on the local gangs to pull them out of trouble in exchange for favours, or interaction with the rich barter economy that has formed in the place of sufficient wealth to support a community. In rare cases, some communities have abolished currency entirely and collectivised their resources, instead relying on the community to solve issues, however, this is more of an exception than a rule, with some crediting the cultural osmosis of the “Take care of number one” attitude of corporates permeating into dreg culture for this. This unpredictable lifestyle has created an unusual gap between dreg ages, either dying in their mid-20s from industrial or gang-land related accidents or dying of age related causes in their early 60s, with very little in between. This unusual gap has caused a sort of reverence of older dregs, who are seen as wiser and more capable for having managed to break the 25+ mark.
Unlike the reserved lifestyles of the corporate suits, dregs are known to form close families of either blood family or found family. Family comes before all in dreg communities, and it’s not uncommon for extended family up to one’s cousin to live under the same roof in compound-like shanty homes. These homes might consist of a central living room as well as personal rooms around the edges, with families eating in the courtyard. The only thing that could possibly even hope to match family bonds are community bonds, with even gangs typically helping their immediate community regardless of their known brutality. Recruitment for gangs happens most often inside of these community bubbles as a result.
Dregs are typically louder and more outspoken than their corporate counterparts, where “spilling honesties” is considered perfectly acceptable so long as it wasn’t done with malice in mind. This can make dregs seem extremely blunt to outsiders, and can lead to misunderstandings outside of Eridani space. A typical dreg conversation will consist of a lot of shouting, arm gestures and teasing, with playful violence not entirely being ruled out. This makes dreg conversations in their native language look like an argument to outsiders, even corporates may struggle to interpret friendliness properly facing these odds.
Similarly to corporates, dregs will usually take their augmentation seriously, having an even closer bond to their roboticist and rarely picking a new one unless it would be geographically impossible to return. Due to the large amount of outward migration by dregs, this attitude is fairly well known in roboticist circles and is regarded with either charm or suspicion, depending on the attitude of the roboticist. Dregs are sometimes described as “overfamiliar” outside of Eridani space.Augmentation
Corporate Augments
Cybernetic modification is an integral part of Eridani’s cultural ideal. Simple tracheal augments are usually the first and the mildest step into augmentation, as they are needed for a lot of people to simply survive with Eridani’s thoroughly polluted air. Having other bionic enhancements is considered a symbol of wealth and prestige. Most electronics in the Federation are specifically designed to interact with augmented eyes – but they are also very functional on their own. A typical Eridanian eye implant can completely replace, or even surpass, a typical hand terminal in functionality – being used to browse the Extranet, communicate on chat relays, and more. As is typical for Eridanian technology, it is also swarmed with ads and is proven to constantly send data about the user’s activity to advertisers, making them somewhat unpopular outside the Federation. Augmentation is so tailored to the workplace in corporate society that people often find difficulty retraining if made redundant, as their augments will have to be replaced in order to suit their new job title. This adds a steep financial barrier to changing professions, and works to prevent upwards mobility without corporate sponsors. In extreme examples, hands may be given an extra finger in order to increase typing speed on legacy systems, at the cost of removing much of their dexterity for other tasks such as handwriting. These augments are often removed by the time the corporate citizens are able to find work outside of Eridani, being seen as too unsightly and off putting to clients. In some cases, synthskin is a requirement for reassignment to certain regions of the spur.
Dreg Augments
Dreg societies take the Eridanian fascination with augmentation technology to an extreme. While a typical Corporate may have no more than an augmented respiratory system, bionic eyes and a few neural implants, a Dreg may maim themselves to replace their flesh with superior, more durable metal – often at the expense of looking presentable. Sleek eye augmentations are removed from former workers by barely qualified surgeons to be replaced with crude prosthetics that do not aim to imitate the human form, but to simply provide functionality – often being, for example, completely filled with one colour, or having coloured scleras. The more brave may opt into removing their limbs for a metal replacement, which is often made “in the house”, with lower quality parts but higher maintainability. Dregs in general are largely proponents of “right to repair” when it comes to prosthetics, shunning branded augments in favour of ones that can be repaired at home or by their favourite roboticist. Function over form is another one of the more unusual ideologies of dreg augmentation, with dregs often caring little about how attractive their augments are so long as they outperform their original limb. As such, dreg roboticists have gained a rightful reputation for making insane or seemingly random choices with their parts lists that give their augments a unique charm, creating a niche market of enthusiasts who share a mindset. Within dreg circles, however, reputation is all, and dreg roboticists can go down within the rich folklore of dregs should they perform their best, amongst names such as David Insurgent and Amiyu Wires. A dreg that can perform augmentation installation could expect to see a large amount of business on this stereotype alone should they open a workshop once out of Epsilon Eridani.
Eridani Life
Food
Eridanian cuisine has a wrongfully gained reputation of being extremely soy based, to the point of caricatures of Eridanian figures often depicting them holding some form of soy based product. Despite this stereotype, this is not entirely true. While Eridanian cuisine as a whole typically makes heavy use of soy based products, other ingredients make up as much of a staple of the Eridanian diet as much as soy does. Plantains, tofu, farmed fish, squash, beans and rice are all staple ingredients of Eridanian cuisine due to their ease of growth in a hydroponics heavy society. A major method of cooking is frying in nut oil, with Eridanians being known to fry anything that can fit in the pan and even some things that can’t, being served with the ever-present soy.
Some famous dishes from Eridani include:
- Puff-puffs, a fried dough ball with a crunchier outside than a donut. These are typically cooked in a pool of oil at the bottom of a pan, however the Eridanian version differs from tradition by adding ground ginger instead of the traditional pepper. Whether it’s acceptable to dip puff-puffs in synthetic cream is still a subject of fierce debate amongst all Eridanians akin to the debates over pineapple on pizza.
- Fufu dumplings with soup, the dumplings are made of pounded plantains and shaped into a ball to be served alongside soup. The soups might contain any number of vegetables, but traditional meats from their earth counterparts are replaced with shrimp, tofu or cod.
- Joloff rice, long grain rice fried in groundnut oil with tomatoes, onions and hot peppers. Again fish and meat substitutes make an appearance here. The dish is a favourite amongst all due to the ease of cooking and the fact that it can be made in one pot.
- Sushi, raw and prepared fish laid atop cooked rice. While a staple of many planets, Eridanian sushi has gained a life of its own, often being created with rare and expensive ingredients grown in the hydroponics and fish farms of the planet. As a cultural export, however, Eridanian sushi rather fails at the term sushi, as the entire affair is deep fat fried. This unusual and controversial perversion of sushi is often blamed upon dregs, who are believed to fry anything if they have oil.
Of course, not all food is made the same in Eridani. While dregs’ communal lifestyle allows them to make the food in a more traditional style with ingredients bought in bulk to save money or grown in stolen hydroponics setups, corporates often spend so much of their day at work that it’s preferred to buy their meals either ready or pre-prepared from a machine. Learning to prepare ingredients, for this reason, is often a skill that makes reinstated very popular amongst their colleagues. One major difference is the quantities of meat substitutes available between dregs and corporates, with corporates often eating triple or even quadruple the serving of expensive goods like fish compared to their dreg counterparts, and malnourishment being rife within dreg living due to the relatively small portions of key proteins being stretched over such long time periods.
Fast food chains exist that are also exclusive to Eridani, such as Shrimp Republic, a location that can be found in almost any Eridanian food court or habitation block. The ingredients often consist of some form of fried shrimp as well as various kinds of skewered foods for easy and enjoyable eating.
Music
Corporate music is considerably more well documented than dreg music when it comes to what is popular, the data algorithms gathering all instances of listening as well as attention spans to songs to form the perfect bands to be fed to the public en-masse. As a bizarre by-product of this feedback loop of attention, two major genres have emerged in Epsilon Eridani, at least amongst the citizens. Club music is one of the most popular Eridanian music genres, being their greatest cultural export and the most listened to genre amongst corporates due to the after work clubbing culture of corporates. Famous artists include Cricket, a DJ known for their use of repetitive but catchy melodies, and DJ Andrex, more famous for their surprisingly fluent lyrical content for club music. The other famous genre is group pop, entirely powered by algorithms and chart ratings, group pop bands usually consist of people who barely know one another working together to make music with help from their managers. These groups are extremely prone to splitting up, giving gossip magazines plenty of content to work off of and forming the basis of how names in the scene are passed around. It is said that you aren’t a group pop musician until your face is on the front of a magazine without your consent.
On the other end of the spectrum, dregs have taken to two more stereotypical favourite genres for an underclass, rap and punk. Both genres tend to focus on life in Dreg society, either the massive amounts of death and poverty, or blaming the system they live in for said death and poverty. While the two genres rarely mix, it isn’t uncommon for them to share lyrical patterns and chord progression. Generally, Eridanian punk is unusual from other genres of punk due to its heavy usage of distortion pedals, electronic instruments and synthesisers. Punk bands in Eridani last for years at a time, but are known to have extremely messy breakups when they get famous, assuming they ever leave their extremely localised sphere of influence. Eridanian rappers on the other hand tend to make a large spectacle of themselves once their music leaves their sphere of influence, hoping to get famous outside of Eridani and hopefully be able to escape. Kizee and Nitrogod are a famous pair of rappers from Seychelles whose music has escaped the constellation’s sphere of influence into the wider Orion Spur, lent largely to them by their aggressive sound and theme of general inequality and the hypocrisy of the wealthy invading their spaces to amuse themselves.
Movies
Movies and films in Eridani are a fairly insular market, with specific tastes of the local audience being received middlingly outside of the systems and vice versa. This is credited in large part to the prolific use of market analysis to write scripts, to the point that some movies are almost entirely algorithmically generated. Some of the more famous rules of these algorithms that always feature include:
- Anti-corporate activity should always result in the demise of the anti-corporate
- Non-citizen dregs may only appear as antagonists, sympathy is allowed in cases of redemption at the end of the production
- The protagonist should not show any form of anti-corporate sentiment, except when portraying their darkest hour
- Members of corporations may only be shown as villains in the event that they are acting against the best interests of the corporation
These restrictive rules have led to a series of set movie genres that are guaranteed to succeed within the borders of the ECA, and at least break even outside of it: Corporate dramas, action movies starring PMCs as the protagonists and adaptations of literature already popular within the ECA.
The unpopular content of these films has created another industry within dreg society however: Independent Movies. These are films created independent of the Idris subsidiary studios that dominate the industry in the ECA and are often created with the express purpose of defying these algorithmic and borderline propagandistic productions. Largely these are made by expelled movie crews and first generation dregs, who have the skills to make passable cinema with the limited equipment they have access to, however these existing skills can only do so much to push past the technical limitations of their existence. These films rarely see much viewing outside of dreg cinemas and communities, largely seen as oddities to be enjoyed by a cult following of outsiders who often take technical difficulties as artistic choices. These films often tackle the problems of daily dreg life, but can also be seen as indulgent power fantasy enjoyed by a downtrodden populace attempting to escape the realities of dreg living. The most popular of these types of film centre around well known dreg folklore figures, their story and their message to the downtrodden.
Language
The closest language the Corporate Alliance has to an official language is Tradeband, used to ease business transactions. It is the most used language in the workplace and typically any resident of the Eridanus Constellation can speak it well enough to conduct their job in Tradeband. This is not the only language in the Alliance however, and almost any human language can be spoken by at least a handful of people. Tourists often find it easier to ask for directions in the ECA as opposed to any other region sheerly on the odds that they bump into somebody that speaks their native language. On the other side of the coin, dregs stubbornly create their own culture to counter the corporate one, speaking Freespeak and similar other languages in their own society and typically only using Tradeband in corporate owned workplaces. This comes across as antiquated to outsiders, but is often viewed by dregs as a result of their highly independence seeking nature.
Dregs also speak a strange form of Freespeak that can only be described as a thieves’ cant, known as Spitting Proper. Spoken almost exclusively by dregs with ties to the criminal syndicates, the closest comparison one can make to a 21st century language would be Polari, and it holds a similar history, being used to mask discussions of criminal activity, grow fellowship amongst its speakers and hide information from anybody that may be eavesdropping. Spoken fluently by the criminal underbelly, it is near impenetrable to outsiders outside of famous words like “knab”. To an extent, most dreg teenagers speak enough of it with the intent to hide what they’re doing from their parents, assuming (often wrongfully) that their parents cannot Spit Proper.
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Boss | Insult, akin to calling your superior by a royal title. |
| Chief | Respectful term for the person in charge. |
| Suit | Corporate. |
| Fek | Fuck. Works the same way. |
| Clacker | Asshole. Insult and bodypart. |
| Drongo | Idiot. |
| Biz | Shit, in the sense of "I'm not doing that shit" or "[...] and shit like that" |
| Tick | Sec (second). e.g "Just a tick" |
| Wrong boots | Someone who is transgender. “Born in the wrong shoes” meaning born in the wrong body. Not a derogatory term. |
| Am/Ami/Amino | Partner/boy/girlfriend. Romantic in nature. |
| Bov/Bovino | Best friend. |
| Krok | Outsider/non-dreg |
| Knab | "Guy". Can refer to anyone. |
| Heavy | Hired muscle. "Who's the heavy?" |
| Extra | Hacker. Comes from hackers often being treated as unnecessary by inexperienced teams. |
| Mask | Inside man. |
| Fixer | Person who arranges for jobs. They may collect information, arrange meetings and find extra members for a crew. |
| Cashie | Salesman, usually illicit. |
| Patcher | Doctor of any kind, but usually used for ones that don't tell police about their patients. |
| Wrencher | Engineer. |
| Robowrencher | Roboticist, usually augmentation specialists. |
| Helmet | Mercenary or police. Typically used to refer to mercenaries that take police work, rather than all mercenaries. |
| Gun | General mercenary, regardless of if they use a gun. |
| Debt | Job. |
| Cark | Die, not murdered. |
| Creased | Murdered. |
| Crease | To murder. |
| Map | Understand. |
| Tool | Fix something. |
| Scroll | Watch something happen. |
| Spit | Speak. |
| Gab | To have a conversation. |
| Scribble | Write. |
| Riccy | Rich. Sometimes derogatory, often used to describe a target for robbery. |
| Band | Gang. |
| Banded | Married. |
| Sniffer | Brown-noser. Somebody who sucks up to authority. |
| Tail | Related to the term rat. An informant. |
| Affirmed | Understood, yes. |
| Running your/their trail | Following you/somebody. Not necessarily bad. |
| Palm | Steal. |
| Knock | Beat up or damage. |
| Ice/Arctic | Cool. |
| Sign the dots | Get arrested. |
| In my turf | In your face, breaking personal space. |
| Slacks | Dregs who associate with suits. Derogatory term for reinstated. |
Non-Humans
Largely comprised of refugees who fled the immediate aftermath of the Azunali Revolution, the Tajara Diaspora on Eridani is almost entirely dregs, with a handful of later-reinstated individuals. These groups live in largely segregated communities, partly through choice and partly due to the circumstances of their mass migration. Culturally similar to dregs, they still hold the idea of Sadani in regard, seeing it as a survival guide to the rugged and unpredictable lives led in the system. Many tajara born in Eridani speak their ancestral languages poorly, instead being fluent in Tradeband or Freespeak, depending on their circumstances. Being such a tight knit community, with many forming their own tribes on the planet, there are some Kowloons on Aegir that consist entirely of tajarans, often of varying origins. Their version of freespeak is less guttural, with R sounds rolled to ease their biology. Particularly zealous believers of Sadani end up spending their days as little better than conmen, trying to find a quick "innovation" in the criminal underground, giving tajarans a general regard by dregs as untrustworthy but useful.
In the past, exiled Unathi Tech-Princes arrived in Monaco with considerable wealth and immediately found a home among the cutthroat world of Eridani suits. While some work across the system, they have found a special niche in Monaco and blitzed their way to dominate the industry after spending years carefully studying human psychology.
None in the galaxy can match the glamor and sheen of a tourist district owned by a Tech-Prince, which they have called "Transcends". The entire district is meticulously crafted to evoke the feeling of nostalgia and energy of youth. The music you hear pumped through the streets is the generic and familiar chopped up to be psychedelia and hypnotic, bringing snippets of songs you've heard long ago repackaged with an upbeat sheen.
Monuments, hotels, and malls are arranged and built to evoke a dream-like feel while remaining comfortingly familiar. A Transcend present a utopia, with every single piece of brickwork exploding with optimism and excess. When you walk down the street, no matter where you look, anything and everything is possible - but at the same time, everything is so simple. Arcades are bursting with natural plants like jungles that cover the lobby; reflecting pools are illuminated with soft pinks and purples; and nanomeshes draped over the district's domes simulate the eternal sunshine of the beach - and entire beaches are built in miniature, with warm waters and free drinks.
To keep the emotional and aesthetic allure of simplicity mixed with possibility, there is no cost to anything inside a Transcend. They make their money by subscription fees, with stiff payments covering a weekly or monthly stay.
As careful as the enterprises are, there is still an emptiness beneath the glimmering lights and nostalgia. The experience of visiting a Transcend is hypnotic and can be extremely addictive. Many wayward visitors have lost their entire life savings desperately trying to keep their nostalgic dreamscape alive.
This is made worse by the exits from the Transcend - the bright, cheerful exit doors lead into tunnels that gradually become gray and plastered with advertisements, graffiti, posters, and simulated sounds of industry, traffic, and irritating white noise playing just beneath normal human hearing. Reintroduction to the normal, the mundane, is made as unpleasant and heartbreaking as possible - and every few steps, there's another door with that glowing neon sign of a smiling couple looking down at you, encouraging you to come back and feel happiness again. Don't you want to be happy? Don't you want to Transcend?other stuff
Dreg Folklore
Dregs have constructed a rich tapestry of legendary folk figures, some of which are simply of note while others can be considered tales intended to teach a lesson through the failures or successes of another real figure. While large parts of the folklore are embellished, it is often the case that every story’s primary beats are largely true, immortalising significant dregs in the imaginations of children and adults alike. Some figures are folk heroes, standing defiant against the corporations and the gangs to try and bring dregs into a new era, while others are villains and cautionary tales about what power does to a person. The vast majority, however, are simply interesting figures that have some moral behind their story, their fates ultimately doing little for the cause of the dregs except providing stories to entertain and educate the next generation. The requirements to become a folk figure are murky to say the least, but the most famous typically have the most outrageous stories, to the point that some are doubted to have existed at all. Some famous folk heroes include:
Nicknamed for his revolutionary tendencies, David is believed to have been the first to draw blood against corporate mercenaries during the Thermostat Revolution. A native of Faroe, David was already well known for his combat related prosthetics and had a reputation for fair pricing and skilled craftsmanship. Most stories surrounding him take this angle, portraying him as an honest man turned revolutionary leader, ultimately betrayed by Little Mojisola in exchange for a sum of money that varies story to story.
Also known as Mairo Diver, she is a sort of living legend within the ECA, hero to dregs and horror story to corporate network security. While technically not quite a folk hero, due to her living status, she is so embroiled in myth and misinformation due to her secretive life that she has become entirely separate to her legend. Confirmed actions include leaking Zavodskoi Interstellar body-camera footage of war crimes committed by the corporation, releasing documents detailing the unethical nature of Zeng-Hu Pharmaceuticals test subject selection, and the destruction of an Idris server farm. However, the folk lore version of her can commit acts that are dubious if even possible through traditional hacking methods, while often emphasising her whimsical nature contrasted against her numerous warrants for arrest in all major nations. She is rumoured to reside in an abandoned space station with her co-conspirators and romantic partners, plural.
Famous for one act and one act only, Old Toyin is both a hero and a cautionary tale of what happens when one stands up against the criminal syndicates that dominate the dreg world. While some take her story to be an example of what happens when an old dreg is underestimated, many take it as a warning to expect war if one attacks these gangs. Old Toyin’s story typically goes as such: Old Toyin had lived in her sector of her kowloon for almost her entire life, to the point that nobody on her corridor remembered when she moved in. One day, a group of the Three Star Syndicate demanded that she move out of her home, so that they may turn it into a gambling parlour. Old Toyin refused, stating they would have to kill her to get that property from her. After some arguing, the gangsters left, promising to return with more men. In this time, Old Toyin prepared dinner for her infirm neighbour, said goodbye to her grandson and turned her room into what could qualify as a fortress. By the time the gangsters returned, she had armed herself with a borrowed rifle and walled herself into the room with the help of her neighbours, having a handful of holes to fire out at the gangsters through. Details of the gun fight differ, but the death toll of the gangsters before they demolished the wall and killed Old Toyin is always two digits in all accounts. Almost all accounts emphasise that despite her age and bravery, she was spared no mercy and killed just as brutally as a young dreg would have been.
A famous singer and advocate for dreg freedom, Namkoisse is often a stand-in for stories that were very unlikely to have actually been him. His role in dreg culture is as the hero everybody can love, and documentation of his real life is often dreary in comparison to his folklore existence. Namkoisse has been confirmed to have organised illegal raves inside corporate offices, his claim to fame, and ultimately was charged and jailed for his actions. His trial was a show trial, intended to show the dreg population what happens to rebels, but instead it immortalised him as he read a prepared speech on the witness podium and openly criticised the language and methodology of the court. He has since become the symbol of social rebellion against corporations, and many an aspiring musician have copied his illegal raves in his honour.
More sparingly is the use of folk villains, usually cautionary tales intended to warn others against considering corporate affiliation. In particular is a famous story that almost every dreg knows:
Malcolm Oyibo is not so much a figure with a consistent story more than a stock character, a villain that fills the void in the collective memory of dreg folklore when telling the story of a more obscure hero. Malcolm is more of a series of characteristics that make for a villain to the story, inconsistent and often not even in the same job twice. He may be a quartermaster one day, or a mercenary the next, or maybe even a CEO. The important part is that he is a backstabber and a foreigner that desperately seeks to be accepted by his corporate overlords, a rather naked allegory for the view of dregs on reinstated.
And finally come a unique aspect of dreg folklore, at least in terms of modern folklore: legendary locations. These locations may range from safe-havens for the most wanted of Epsilon Eridani’s underworld to rumoured paradises of workers’ rights within the very borders of the hell scape that is Aegir’s moon. Some of these locations include:
- The Killing Floor: Bar and pilgrimage site for any starry eyed revolutionary, rumoured to be the favourite haunt of David Insurgent and many of the Thermostat Revolutionaries. Today it stands as a monument and tourist trap for the revolutionary undercurrent that slowly meanders through dreg culture. The folklore version, however, is a hive of revolutionary activity in which the intellectuals of dreg liberation come to exchange ideas.
- Haven: A simple and descriptive name, Haven is a rumoured squat within a corporate hab block that is so well defended that it is functionally a microstate within Eridanian territory. Some call it an ongoing revolution, while others describe it more as the only truly neutral ground for major figures to meet without worrying about being assassinated.
- The Office: An ironic name for possibly the most secure and brutal prison in the Orion Spur. The Office is rumoured to have every defence imaginable, from air defences to closing wall traps to laser grids closing cells off, only the hardest and most dangerous the Spur has to offer are supposedly housed here. Outsiders often believe The Office is actually many prisons amalgamated into a single prison in the collective consciousness of dregs.