Confluence of Empires (A1-0)

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Confluence of Empires Interstellar Multiclade MetaCivilization
Official Symbol of the Confluence of Empires.
Founded	7032 Before Breached Tiyanki
Location	Sector A1-0, Spinwards, Rimwards
Capital	Achshelar
Population	2091.68 Trillion Virtuals: 1996.53 trillion Embodied: 119.35 trillion
Head of state	The Sequence, Hyper-intelligent Class-6 AI
Language	Ur'Soph
Military	Coempireal Armed Forces
Intelligence service	The Eyes
Currency	Sovereign (இ), used both phisically and digitally.

The Confluence of Empires, also known as the Confluence, COE or ConEmp, is a highly diverse and technologically advanced interstellar metacivilization comprised of more than 860,000 star systems located in the spinwards and rimwards regions of Sector A1-0, occupying a large volume of space bordering those of the Twilight Ascendancy, the Yukian Imperium and the Sapphire Commonwealth. The empire's territories are linked together by a vast fractal network of traversable and comm-gauge artificial wormholes, known as the Wormwork, used to transfer vast amounts of traffic, materials and information quickly from distant areas of the empire: these artificially stabilized topological defects are created in enormous industrial complexes run by specialized hyper-intelligent AIs.

The Confluence is an Aiocracy, ruled and overseen by a vast distributed hyper-intelligent Class-6 AI, known as the Sequence of Empires, or just the Sequence. The AI possesses an enormous processing substrate spread throughout the entire empire, the majority of which is hosted within the very wormholes that connect coempireal civilization and the rest of their computronium megastructures. The Sequence controls an extensive hierarchy of lesser hyper-intelligent AIs ranging from Classes 1 to 5, who are commonly known by coemperial citizens as the HyperAIs and handle important imperial operations such as diplomacy and international relations, observe regional politics and oversee all of the empire's industrial and military apparatus. Despite being effectively ruled by a single intelligence, the Confluence is actually divided between tens of thousands of highly different polities and associations with high degrees of political autonomy and freedom, most of which possess their own local and regional governments. The Achshelar star system is the capital of the Confluence of Empires: with a very large number of megastructures and swarms of orbital habitats, the capital also hosts one of the Sequence's main processing nodes. Thanks to the system's vast habitable space and computronium nodes, together with the relative vicinity to the ruling digital god it allows for, Achshelar has risen through the millennia to become one of the biggest centers of Coempireal population and industry.

As of 0 BBT, the Confluence has a primarily virtual population of approximately 2.09 quadrillion citizens, of which only 119.35 trillion are embodied sophonts divided between many clades and hundreds or even thousands of related species and sub-species. The COE's population can be divided into two very large historical subdivisions: the Founderkin and the Flowkin. The Founderkin are the most numerous and diverse, with 35 different clades belonging to the group, and are all sophonts that can ultimately trace back their ultimate origin and ancestry to Galactya, Silvalia or Terra: the Terragens, the Galactyakin, and the Silvalians, the three "founding" civilizations of the Confluence as the name of their group implies. Each of these civilizations holds a notable percentage of the overall population, having had thousands of years to grow independently and artificially diversify before the COE's existence, and subsequently being the first groups to develop within the newly-emerging metasociety. The Flowkin are the least numerous, and instead are all clades and other sophonts that developed independently of the three founding civilizations, and later "flowed into" the Confluence (hence their name) mostly through willing association. There are currently fifteen Flowkin clades that are now living in the empire as citizens, ranging from the relatively regular ocean-dwelling fish-like Baskipirs, to much more exotic sapients such as sylicone-based crystalline Zyloxin and the exotic Neunevunn living inside the superfluid outer cores of neutron stars. While most of these xenosophonts were first contacted when still in their equivalents of the interplanetary or information age, the Tihumuuh and Trrarrusians already possessed interstellar civilizations of their own, encompassing thousands of star systems, which were then integrated into wider Coempireal civilization after both agreed to join the empire.

Galactography

Situated in spinwards and rimwards regions of Sector A1-0, relatively close to the center of the sector, the Confluence occupies an irregularly-shaped volume of space 129.14 million cublic lightyears in volume, developing slightly more upwards through the galactic disk than towards the rim and core. Approximately 862,000 star systems are located within this slowly growing volume of space and colonized to some degree, with population and infrastructure levels rising as one gets closer to the center of the empire.

Regions of Space

The Confluence's occupied volume is divided into four concentric regions of space, reflecting their general levels of urbanization and historical development. These are:

• The Inner Sphere: an irregular ovoid approximately one hundred light years in radius, centered around the Achshelar system. The Inner Sphere is the most densely settled region of space within the Confluence, with civilization going back thousands of years in most systems and worlds. In the Sphere are located the main industrial and population centers of the civilization: millions of orbital habitats, hundreds of vast megastructures and mighty wormhole connections making up the largest relays of the imperial wormhole network. Most of the HyperAIs of the empire also reside within this region.
• The Middle Regions: an irregular and large volume of space occupying some 100.5 million cubic lightyears around the Inner Sphere. These are the old frontier systems of the Expansion Age and the early Integration Age, almost all of them long since settled, developed, and heavily infrastructuralized. Here are imperial regional capitals that can no longer be called provincial, often the homesystems of ancient Confluence member civilizations, being thousands of years old, with mighty wormhole links, newly emerging polities, various megascale projects, and ancient relativistic trade routes. The Middle Regions represent more than 77% of the Confluence's volume of claimed space.
• The Outer Volumes: an irregular and relatively thin volume of space surrounding the Middle Regions. This is the region of the empire just behind the frontier, in which are located the systems that were colonized not too long ago and are now starting to become more developed. Some Outer Volumes systems have been settled for several centuries or even several millennia thanks to the rare long-shot colonization missions, and are as rich in culture and history and information as any in the Middle Regions. These are linked by the wormhole network to the Inner Sphere and Middle Regions capitals, and serve as the nucleus for further development.
• The Frontier: the (very slowly) ever-expanding wavefront of Coempireal exploration and colonisation. The periphery is in fact the furthest layer of the Outer Volumes, containing only star systems that have been very recently explored and are just now starting the very first phases of colonization. The wider Frontier is divided into various separate sections, depending on he nature of their initiative and location: the Corewards Expansion, for example, is a large imperial effort to expand in a new volume of space towards the galactic core, while the Khary'ivinne Rush is a vast expansion project lead by many xenosophont and exotic terragen groups, megacorporations and research organization to expand spinwards.

Coempireal Expansion

Advanced, Pac-Man Conversion Drive Arkships in orbit of the blue ice giant Mephistodosi, 5623 BBT.

Even after the Sequence emerged as a Class-4 HyperAI in the 4900s BBT and subsequently created Void Bubbles, the first true FTL technology of the Confluence (followed by enormous advancements in the already existing traversable wormholes), Confluence expansion was and often is carried out at sublight speeds. Various kinds of advanced internal fusion drives, catalyzed antimatter drives and conversion drives, were used as the main propulsion systems by the pre-COE civilizations and by the Confluence itself: conversion ramscoop and lossless total conversion drives, the most advanced propulsion systems of the era, reaching speeds up to 0.96 c or even higher. Being in actual movement through space and not isolated within a bubble of warped spacetime, these relativistic vessels had limited but still very high accelerations: computronium ships, in which the passengers would reside within a locally-hosted virtual world or micro-cybercosm, would often reach very near their maximum acceleration, typically ranging between 20 and 50 g depending on the type of drive that was used. For the same reason, time dilation could often be considerable when travelling aboard these ships, but was more often than not a rather welcome feature that would shorten the trip for the passengers. For example, if a ship was travelling at 96% of the speed of light for an hour, only 16 minutes and 48 seconds would have passed from a passenger's point of view.

For centuries, before the emergence of the Sequence and the invention of Void Bubbles, the developing Wormworks of the three founding civilization, later united into one, became fundamental for the creation of truly cohesive interstellar civilization and for greatly boosting colonization speeds, as well as internal travel between connected systems. Through relativistic conversion drive vessels moving at 0.7 c due to constraints in the stabilization systems of the topological constructs, wormhole ends would be carried to the desired locations and inflated on site, connecting the two systems and allowing colonization missions and other vessels to pass through. Due to many vessels being able to travel at much higher relativistic speeds, wormholes would often connect independent colonies back to the main civilization, and later the Confluence. Some of these situations resulted in conflict, with imperial forces having to subdue the aggressive independent colonies, although these events were few and far between.

Together with the development of the Wormwork, another technology for interstellar colonization was invented, called Starsparks. These self-replicating magmatter devices are launched at relativistic speeds to a targeted star. When they reach their destination they collide with and plunge into their target star, and begin to gather in the surrounding stellar material to grow. When enough material is accumulated, the Starsparks use some of it as fuel to launch themselves out of the star into orbit, from where they use the remaining stellar material to to construct nanomachines and deployment devices through built-in nucleosynthesis reactors. Said deployers are then used to land the nanomachines on the system's celestial objects to construct infrastructure. Initially, Starsparks could only be constructed by the Class-3 HyperAIs, and therefore would only be used for imperial colonial projects: however, as other HyperAIs within the civilizations and following Confluence began to ascend to the third Sophonce Class and beyond, the technology became much more widespread, and starsparks began to be utilized by many independent groups and individuals. Starsparks met their highest point in usage during the Integration Age, and are utilized for imperial expansion in the current era. Although they are employed in nearly all areas of the Frontier, they are most common in the coemperial Corewards Expansion.

After the development of superluminal propulsion at the end of the Integration Era, the Sequence established that imperial expansion had to be "slowed down" so that resources and colonization efforts could be concentrated on already colonized or still unclaimed system already present within the empire's volume of space. As such, despite new FTL technologies allowing the Confluence to expand thousands of times faster, even in the Current Era outwards colonization continues to occur at a rate that matches that of the Expansion and Integration Age. Despite this, the empire has claimed a larger volume of space than the one it actually controls: this region is known in the empire as Expansion Space, and as the name suggest has been "reserved" for the COE’s expansion.

The Wormwork: Coempireal Wormhole Network

A freighter ship approaching the approximately four kilometers wide mouth of the wormhole link 235-12, one of the tens of thousands of wormhole links within the Confluence's Wormwork.

A beam of modulated electromagnetic radiation carrying vast amounts of data about interferometer observations is sent through a microscopic comms-gauge wormhole link in the Wormwork.

The Wormwork, officially known as the Coempireal Wormhole Network, is a modular and ever expanding fractal network of artificial wormholes that connects more than 66.000 star systems within the Terragen empire. The Wormwork has existed since the 5500 BBTs, when the individual wormhole networks of the founding civilizations merged into one. Predating actual FTL travel by centuries, the Wormwork was, and still continues to be, the circulatory system of the entire Confluence that conveyed goods, services, data streams, and sapients of all kinds to where they were needed or where they wished to go even during the pre-superluminal age. Even back then, it was possible for a relativistic vessel to cross from one side of the empire to the other in just a couple of weeks thanks to the Wormwork's links.

The general configuration of the Wormwork is based on a branching network of Relay Systems. Few wormholes directly link inhabited system to inhabited system, and instead most link to Relays; clusters of 10 to 100 wormholes orbiting within 60 astronomical units from a suitable star. The Relay' star itself is rarely inhabited, and instead is heavily re-engineered by the supervising HyperAI for material to maintain the Wormwork, and their own specialized minds. Maintenance is comprised of stored mass for new wormholes, metric forges to create new wormholes, gravity tug swarms to maintain the chaotic orbits of the Relay System and many more routine engineering requirements. Some Relay Systems are connected across branches to Linkers, systems that host a pair of wormholes leading to different Relays. Linkers allow for traffic across and along the Wormwork: aside from alleviating traffic through root systems, Linkers ensure the network would remain connected even in the event of a major loss of route relays. Both of the two sub-networks of traversable and comm-gauge wormholes that make up the Wormwork are arranged in this manner, and often overlap perfectly. Due to the nature of the much smaller comm-gauge wormholes, these can be packed in a much tighter volume of space, typically being incorporated in the Relay's star re-engineered maintenance and management complex.

The Wormwork Code, a designation system based on position within the wider network, allows each individual Relay and wormhole Link to be easily identifiable by a special designation:

• The numbers 0 through 9 are assigned to the ten, first level Relay systems, also known as the ten "Alpha Relays".
• For each higher level numbers 1 through 9 are appended onto the designation of the previous Relay system, and therefore the level of a given Relay and access route can be determined by its designation.
• Each wormhole within a Relay System is identified by a second number placed behind the designation of their Relay, and assigned in order of link creation.

For example: 0 is the designation for the Relay Alpha 0. Entering the third wormhole within Alpha 0 would lead to Relay 03. Going further, entering the fifth wormhole within 03 would lead to Relay 035. If, ipothetically speaking, Relay 035 did not connect to any more Relays, but only to single locations, it's ninth wormhole would be designated as Link 035-9.

There is however one exception to this configuration: Achshelar, the very center of the Wormwork and capital of the Confluence. Having a special Wormwork Code designation of Omega (Ω), the system contains 10 massive Linker wormholes hundreds of kilometers in diameter: these are arranged in the same way that individual links are within a regular Relay, and each of these wormholes connects to one of the ten level-one Alpha Relays. In addition to these 10 Linkers, the system contains another 90 wormhole links that connect to many highly important systems and locations within the Confluence, for most of these in addition to the regular wormhole links connected to the other Relays.

Important Systems and Worlds

• Acheshelar (capital)
• NuSol (regional capital)
• Lux’saah (regional capital)
• Ourem (regional capital)
• Ventari’s Pride
• Ouroboros
• Eternal Crown
• Star of the Oceans

Government and Politics

Government Type and Individual Polities

• List of polities in the Confluence of Empires

The Confluence of Empires is a mix between a Direct and Indirect Aiocracy: while many HyperAIs subordinate to the Sequence control the empire through direct intervention, avatars and memetic influence, there is still a considerable amount of political autonomy and freedom. In fact, the Confluence is divided in a very large number of component sub-polities, numbering in the tens of thousands: despite all being part of the empire and sharing the same general basic metaethics and metapsychology, their notable political autonomy and cultural freedom make these polities very varied and different from one another. They also vary a lot in size, with some being confined to a single city or small orbital habitat, while others might span thousands of star systems. The most common forms of local government for these polities are libertarian and socialist cyberdemocracies, aiocracies and various forms of theocracies and anarchies. However, many other more exotic forms of government and rule exist. Component polities also differ immensely in their nature: while some are similar to “regular” nations and empires, others are more like megacorporations, large group minds, institutes and nearly all possible kinds of associations between sapient beings. Here is a list with some notable representative polities and associations, and their main characteristics:

• Luinil Dominion: a pseudo-aristocratic polity of empathic nearbaseline humans occupying a single star system, Luinil. Highly industrialist and religious, the Dominion is characterized by both a proud martial culture, as well as a deep inclination towards diplomacy augmented by the powerful social cognition systems of its citizens. As such, the Dominion will usually facilitate disputes and agreements between neighbouring polities, often gaining a lot for themselves in the process.
• MoraCloud Paradigm: a fully virtual polity consisting of uploaded and artificial minds hosted within a vast cloud of nanotechnological fog orbiting the red supergiant star Edandris. The fog effectively acts as a more "diluted" dyson swarm, with each foglet using the energy collected from the star to collectively run a vast cybercosm in which the members of the Paradigm live. Although largely isolated within its own realities, the Paradigm still interacts with the wider empire through tourism of its cybercosm.
• Crimson Association: a megacorporation specializing in phantom-tourism run by the Caretaker HyperAI centered around the natural garden world of Manzat. The Association has created a large orbital ring, known as the Red Crown, around the planet, that acts as a museum, a research center, a resort and as a living space for the megacorp's members. The orbital ring also contains the structures necessary for planetary defense and ecology maintenance, as well as the phantom tourism arrays.
• Givian Industriarchy: a free-market capitalistic polity centered around Hildemar, a small cluster of eight neutron stars in the Middle Regions. Governed by the Class-4 HyperAI known as Verigen, an ascended Neunevunn, the Industriarchy is an association between all sapients who are interested in interacting with eachother and increasing their wealth through voluntary financial transactions, acquiring shares in the stock market and creating corporations and associations for various business ventures.
• Brunivaian Confederation: a loose and very distributed cyberdemocratic civilization of sapients living around the brown dwarfs in the empire, with its capital being the Reminaava brown dwarf system. Brunivaians have constructed vast arrays of orbital habitats and large megastructures around these celestial bodies, and often utilize neumann reactor technology to illuminate the equatorial space of their parent brown dwarf to terraform the extensive moon systems and gather radiant energy.
• Albidrean Serenity: a large empire governed by many HyperAIs dedicated to creating perfect societies for the empire's citizens. Controlling thousands of stars, worlds and habitats all throughout the Terragen Empire, the Serenity does not have a culture of its own, since its only true objective is building utopias: as such, each habitat and world of the Albidrean Serenity is extremely diverse, with little to no common characteristics between one another apart from their HyperAI overseers.
• Solarian Unity: an empire based on the precepts of Solarism, centered around and governed by the Class-5 HyperAI known as NurVisage. One of the largest polities within Terragen civilization, the Unity and its solarians are known for their grandiosity, zeal and their emphasis on self-expression, creativity, and the self-actualisation of the individual. It's capital is the quintuple star system Alulmina, a main population center and wormhole juncture of the Inner Sphere, as well as one of its most urbanized systems.
• Dem'seishep Planegineering: a large megacorporation centered around high-quality and high-speed planetary engineering, primarily represented by its Velupyota and Mandeloop members. The megacorp is primarily active on the imperial frontier and in many systems of the middle regions, where they re-engineer new worlds for their client systems and polities. The megacorp has its "headquarters" in the Vijthras system, and have even managed to acquire a couple wormholes of their own from their HyperAI benefactors.

Legal System and Constitution

The fundamental principles and legal basis of the empire are defined by the Coempireal Constitution, known as the Compact of the Flow, originally written in 7032 BBT and based on a series of metaethical pronouncements attributed to the Sequence and eir subordinates. As for its legal system, the Confluence possesses a complex civil law system based on comprehensive legal codes and, similarly to the constitution, pronouncements by the HyperAIs. This “higher” legal system common to the entirety of the civilization is overlaid with lower, regional and local legal systems (or the absence thereof) that vary by polity, organization, species and culture. The same can be said for the local and regional constitutions of the empire's various component polities.

Law Enforcement and Crime

A common model of computronium smartgel-based Crime Control Bots that is assigned to high-danger ex-criminals after their rehabilitation.

Thanks to the Confluence's enormous material abundance, considerably hedonistic metasociety, and completely automated infrastructure and socio-economic system, crime is a very rare occurrence. These criminal activities tend to be very light and subtle, such as data manipulation, fraud, extortion with embarrassing information or purely software-related crimes. Additionally, crimes are most often prevented from happening thanks to the all-pervasive supervision and public safety infrastructures present on most worlds and habitats, that monitor all public spaces (both physical and virtual) and can most often prevent a crime before it even happens. However, when an illegal act is indeed committed by a Coempireal citizen, the criminal is brought to a specialized rehabilitation center that is directly overseen by its own dedicated staff and AI, and that answers directly to the HyperAI Authorities. Within these centers, tachydidactic courses and other specialized rehabilitative treatments are given in order for the rehabilitating subject to obtain better facilitative skills, such as more efficient communication. With the subject's consent, direct neural interfacing can be used to install mindmods capable of rearranging the individual's value associations to eventually induce a subconscious belief in doing the right thing. Rehabilitation treatments and courses will be drawn out over time to take a more gradual approach, allowing the subject's mind to properly inernalize the courses' lessons and achieve total sucess in the rehabilitation progress. The voluntary mindmodding will also be drawn out over time as to not induce radical changes in personality.

Despite all of the prevention systems in place, much more serious crimes like sub-sapient or sapient abuse, violence and even murder still happen, despite being extremely rare. In these situations tachydidactic courses and specialized treatments are intensified, mindmodding through direct neural interfacing is not optional, and all processes are carried out for even longer periods of time in proportion to the seriousness of the crime and the subject's mental instability. After rehabilitation is complete, the subject is then assigned a control bot or virtual aioid (depending on whether or not the rehabilitated offender is embodied or virtual) that will escort the target in their daily life for a certain period of time to make sure that rehabilitation was truly successful, and to actively intervene in any further attempts at severe misdemeanour.

Citizenship and Sapient Rights

Coempireal citizenship is automatically extended to all sapients, groups and even civilizations that decide to become part of the Confluence, which can be easily achieved through simple request. The only condition for obtaining citizenship is that the requesting sapients officially move their residence over to the COE's worlds, habitats and virtual spaces, although they are still free to leave if they wish to.

Coempireal sapient rights are excellent, and their quality is in fact one of the only things that isn't allowed to vary by polity, as the ruling HyperAIs work to ensure that all sapients within eir domain live under the same utopian standards. Similarly excellent is the treatment for sub-sapient creatures, who are only allowed to be killed in pain-free ways for the special events of a few cultures, and otherwise live undisturbed within enormous, bountiful and carefully maintained wildlife preserves on habitats and megastructures.

Interstellar Relations

The Confluence of Empires has currently established formal relations with the Treecuu Star Empire, the United Empire of Denvaria, and the Republic of United Worlds.

• Open tourism and migration treaties, together with a large cultural exchange program, have been established with the Republic of United Worlds in exchange for providing them scientific, technological, industrial and economic aid. Any form of military support was rejected by Republic leaders for the time being.

Demographics

See also: Clades and Species of the Confluence (A1-0)

The sapients of the Terragen Empire are extremely diverse. Not considering the almost literally endless diversity of virtuals, the thousands of physical species within the empire are part of fifty different terragen and xenosophont clades, and can be baselines, nearbaselines, tweaks, rianths and splices, uplifts, neogens, cyborgs and bioborgs, moravecs, self-replicating neumanns and sapient structures. Additionally, the sapients of the empire are diverse even in regards to their intelligence: they occupy Classes 0 to 6 of the Sophonce Scale, and although the HyperAIs remain beyond understanding even regular Class-0 sapients remain massively intelligent with IQs measured in the hundreds and thousands.

And Thus I Saw With Unbridled Clarity, a Class-2 HyperAI.

Sophscale Population Breakdown

The following is a breakdown of the empire's population based on the imperial Sophonce Scale, with certified and/or estimated numbers followed by short descriptions divided by class.

• Class-6: 1, the Sequence of Empires. Often known as just “the Sequence”, the HyperAI is the ruler of the Confluence.
• Class-5: 11, also known as the Overlords, supported by dedicated cluster brains. Each one of these HyperAIs corresponds in name and archetype to one of the sefirah in the Jewish Kabbalah, and has correlated roles within the wider empire.
• Class-4: 382, also known as the Princes, whose bodies primarily consist of jupiter brains, vast dyson swarms and matrioshka magroses. A number of them operate the Relays of the Wormwork, as well as overseeing industrial centers manufacturing ultra-advanced materials and constructs.
• Class-3: 17.594, also known as the Angels, mainly housed within moon brains, advanced asteroid brains and the largest HabShips and other vessels of the empire. Many of them also operate the largest warships of the CAF, such as the Battlemoons and similarly-sized vessels.
• Class-2: 1.63 million, also known as the Emissaries. Class-2s possess substrates and bodies that are far too diverse from one another to be summarized into broad categories, ranging from nanotechnic diamondoid matrices to biological systems or some combination of these or more. A sizeable portion of these HyperAIs operates the medium-sized warships of the Coempireal Armed Forces. The majority of HabShip minds belong to the second class as well.
• Class-1: 155.42 million, also known as the Drones. Like the Class-2s, these HyperAIs are even more diverse and cannot be generalized, although many possess substrates built with similar (albeit less advanced) versions of the superior second class. A small number of Class-1s operate the smaller warships of the CAF, and are higher in numbers than their military superiors. Class-1s are the closest hyperintelligent beings to the sapient citizens of the empire, and as such are the ones to interact the most with them.
• Class-0: 2091.68 trillion (2.09 quadrillion). The Class-0s, also known as "sapients" or "modosophonts" outnumber all other classes by multiple orders of magnitude. These are the true citizens of the terragen empire, cycling between physical and virtual existence, and divided between fifty clades and a much higher number of derivate species. Most Class-0s are the distant descendants of Galactya, Silvalia and Terra, although an ever growing number of them are fully alien and integrated within the civilization willingly.

Population Growth Factors

While differing between regions, polities and systems, in general the Terragen Empire has a yearly population growth rate of approximately [PLACEHOLDER]%. The Coempireals have a wide array of reproductive technologies at their disposal, which facilitate reproduction immensely and remove practically all of its associated risks. This, coupled with longevity treatments and augmentations, easily achievable immortality, backup technology, automated safety infrastructure that drop death rates to negligeable numbers, as well as post-scarcity economic systems reducing the cost of raising offspring to similarly negligible expenditures, would theoretically lead to much higher growth rates. However, most cultures within the empire expect people to only have one or two children in order to raise them properly, and many polities have laws regarding procreation and replication for their citizens to avoid overpopulation or resource depletion (although no system or world in the empire is anywhere close to reaching that). The locations with the highest birthrates in the empire are in the Outer Volumes and especially in the Frontier, since emigration to those locations is facilitated for those strongly wishing to procreate or replicate.

The Venthari's Pride Dyson is one of the biggest population centers of the Confluence. Located in the Inner Sphere, this diffusion disksphere is home to more than a trillion sapients belonging to thousands of cultures and polities.

Population Distribution

Across the Confluence, the corporeal and virtual populations are approximately distributed between many different environments as follows:

• 39% (815.75 trillion) - Very large megastructures.
• 33% (690.25 trillion) - Orbital habitats and computronium nodes.
• 11% (230.08 trillion) - Aerostatic habitats on gas giants.
• 9% (188.25 trillion) - Surface settlements and partially worldhoused worlds.
• 6% (125.5 trillion) - Re-engineered and fully worldhoused worlds.
• 1.6% (33.47 trillion) - Miscellaneous megascale environments.
• 0.25% (5.23 trillion) - Naturally occurring garden worlds.
• 0.15% (3.15 trillion) - Travelling HabShips.

As the statistics listed above show the Confluence is not a primarily planetary civilization, with 73.75% of its population living in space. Vast habitable megastructures such as dyson swarms, dyson spheres, ringworlds, topopoli and banks' orbitals, together with their vast computronium substrates and other equally-sized computronium megastructures like matryoshka roses, support more than a third of the entire population of the empire. Only some star systems possess such structures, especially in the Inner Sphere and main centers of the Middle Regions, and yet population-wise they dominate the rest of the empire: these are the metropoli of the current era, and the melting pots of Coempireal civilisation. In the vast majority of systems however the dominant environment for corporeal and virtual beings comes in the form of orbital space habitats (such as O'Neill and McKendree Cylinders, Diskworlds and Bishop Rings) and computronium nodes of differing sizes: similarly to the other far larger megastructures, these orbital habitats support a third of the entire Coempireal population. These smaller habitats and nodes are most often found in orbit around stars and gas giants, often forming orbital bands around the latter in the more populated systems. Together with stellar megastructures and orbital habitats, nomadic HabShips and miscellaneous megascale environments such as ederworlds or niven clouds support the remaining 1.75% of the empire's space-based population.

The remaining 26.25% of the COE’s population instead lives on planets and moons. Almost half of the empire's planetary population lives in aerostatic habitats constructed on suitable gas giants, and in some occasions these planets have been engineered to possess atmospheric layers with comfortable temperatures, breathable atmospheres and calm weather patterns, though this remains a relatively rarer occurrance compared to gas giants left in their "natural" state. The population numbers, density and diversity a gas giant colonized through aerostatic habitats can support are often underestimated in the popular imagination, and in some systems of the Inner Sphere these planets are home to hundreds of billions of sapients: even on these highly populous worlds, the amount of room that is still left can be truly staggering. Regardless, the majority of the planetary population lives on the surfaces of rocky planets and moons with surface settlements like domed habitats and partial worldhouses, although a similar yet lower percentage lives on fully re-engineered planets and moons (with fully worldhoused worlds also existing, despite being less common). Finally, a very small fraction of the empire's population (0.25%) lives on naturally occurring garden worlds: primarily speaking, these are the homeworlds of the multiple civilizations that founded the Confluence or became part of it during the Integration Age, massively urbanized, occasionally ecologically restored and protected by a dedicated Caretaker after becoming part of the empire.

Society and Culture

See also: Drugs In Sector A1-0 (A1-0)

A Kilmantsi dressed in a special, ceremonial garnment.

Nanoholographic Entertainer dancing to a popular song in the Jhyffeux Topopolis.

Nearbaseline humans of african descent visit a museum dedicated to their culture and history.

A group of aurelphins photograph themselves on their orbital habitat, the Sidualapochtli.

A cybernetic human augment controlling a remote exploration probe through a holographic interface.

Two Kjatasp Moravecs exchanging large amounts of information by connecting their circuits.

A Corvijnee guiding a small exploration ship through a specialized comman center.

A Jhar'ord wearing one of their typical envirosuits, outfitted with lateral containers for the symbiotic swarm.

The Exoskeleton Pavillions of the Bihlumma Festival, held on the Thimathel Ringworld.

Monkey uplift-cyborgs meditating on Sophican, member world of the Simian League.

Dawn on New Pythia, a world orbiting the Sauphuntus Fractal Dyson.

Common Cultural Factors

Despite its vast diversity, there are still some common factors that affect nearly all cultures and societies within the Confluence.

• Importance of Technology: the vast majority of Coempireals live in artificial environments created by Coempireals. Whether it is an orbital habitat, a virtual world or a re-engineered planet or moon, the average citizen has no sense that 'nature' had anything to do with their life nor that it is anything they are at the mercy of. This, combined with ready access to highly advanced automation technology allowing individuals or small groups to undertake enormous projects, means that the natural world is more often seen as a blank canvas at the mercy of the Terragens, or something to be protected.
• Material Prosperity: with the Confluence essentially being an automated post-scarcity utopia, nearly all definitions of wealth and poverty are massively different from those in the rest of the Sector. Energy and materials are available to all, sustenance is rarely scarce and sophisticated manufactured goods are commonplace, which lead to crimes of property becoming virtually non-existent in most places.
• Modes of Existence: many of the empire's citizens reside within the Cybercosm, the vast network of the Confluence's connected virtual realities. Countless beings live permanently within their virtual environments, while many others both virtual and embodied switch periodically from one mode of existence to the other. Regardless of this, within the empire both the physical and virtual world are deeply tied together, and most citizens commonly interact with both on a daily basis through avatars, neural interfaces, and many other technologies.
• Morphological Freedom: a contributor in both the diversity and peacefulness of coempireal civilization is the near total morphological freedom that all citizens enjoy as a basic right. Biological and/or cybernetic alteration, augmentation, or complete redesign and replacement of the physical body is a trivial everyday occurrence, while readily downloaded psychoware makes almost any conceivable mental adjustment nearly as simple: for virtual sapients such changes are even simpler and much faster. The use of such technologies over thousands of years and hundreds of thousands of star systems has rendered conflicts around race, gender, sexuality, and substrate futile and obsolete.
• Longevity: sapients in the Confluence can extend their lifespan indefinitely if they choose to, and death as a natural consequence of aging has been functionally eliminated since aging beyond adulthood is only exercised as a lifestyle choice. And when a sapient does indeed die due to an accident or by deliberate choice, they are often succeded by their backups, who are effectively the same individual. All this tends greatly expand the scope of what is considered a reasonable timespan for a particular project: as such decades and even centuries become trivial time amounts of time.
• Mass Society: nearly all societies in the empire possess interconnected numbers of people boggling to most other civilizations. In contrast, a combination of massive populations, wide ranging and rapid communications and travel, nearly unlimited living space, and various mental augmentations allow an individual to enjoy close personal relationships with thousands of endlessly diverse sapients.
• Political Stability: many Coempireal polities have remained in place essentially unchanged for thousands of years. Many HyperAIs have brought unprecedented stability through their means in the lesser polities of the sapients who are under their direction. However, even in civilizations exclusively run by regular sapients, the combination of long lives, abundant resources, cyberdemocratic governments, ready access to the relief valve of migration elsewhere, and a generally peaceful existence often lead to long periods with little or no political change. All this extends to the entirety of the Confluence itself, which has remained completely stable without any major internal conflict for more than 7000 years.
• Automation and Employment: polities, groups and individuals within the empire have access to highly technologically advanced automation technologies that have removed any need for sapient labour to provide for all physical or social needs. As such sapients do not live in societies where employment or any other kind of market participation is required to meet financial needs. A plethora of alternate mechanisms exist instead, the exact workings of which are optimised for local cultural values. Additionally, while overall daily participation may be low, private markets also exist to a varying degree. Although sapients don't have to engage in gainful employment, terragen metasociety mostly isn't one of non-stop idle leisure, and citizens are encouraged to engage within their community, most notably in the arts and recreation.
• Cultural and Historical Depth: despite some exceptions, the history of the Confluence and its member civilizations is accessible back to their very infancy, providing a total historical perspective spanning even dozens of millennia. Most great thinkers of the past are still remembered by name, some religions are still active and even popular after many millennia of existence, and much of the great art and literature of the past has not lost its appeal and status and has even been re-copied, translated, and imitated in new forms throughout the ages. High confidence historical models and recreations are readily accessible to all, and the availability of good records and expert translation programs has led to cultures of enormous richness.

Metapsychology & Metaethics

The Confluence has enormous valuation of diversity in all its forms, encouraging all citizens to augment themselves and explore different identities, bodies, time rates and modes of existence to eventually find their preferred state of being. It is also extremely xenophilic, being supportive of all sapient rights regardless of their current state of existence, which has brough multiple xenosapient species and civilizations to willingly become part of the Confluence over the millennia. The exact approach taken to enforce sapient rights varies by polity, but most simply "fuse" these obligatory Imperial prerogatives with their own ethics and values. Within the metacivilization, all sapients are always culturally encouraged to interact with and respect one another regardless of political affiliation, ideology, culture, religion, species or state of being. On a general level there is little to no widespread psychological stagnation in the empire, especially thanks to its extreme diversity and endless possibilities; however, whenever necessary, memetic intervention will be employed by the Sequence’s subordinates. Apart from these general overarching characteristics, all other aspects of coempireal metapsychology and metaethics vary too greatly between cultures, clades and polities to be efffectively summarized any further.

Metaculture & Society

Coempireal metaculture and society are extremely diversified and commonly idiosyncratic, but are very often centered around promoting diversity and cooperation between all sapients. Coempireal society tends to be very hedonistic, with the pursuit of pleasure in all its forms and entertainment often being highly valued. Intellectual enrichment, socialization and augmentation of the self are also very widespread in the metasociety, and are often considered to be utmost priorities by many sapients. The HyperAIs openly disapprove of cultural homogenousness, and actively promote diversification and cultural conservation. When new groups or civilizations from outside are integrated within the Confluence, all sapients are always encouraged to maintain and cultivate their own cultural identities, and to freely interact with the already existing ones. Together with its cultures, countless religions and beliefs exist within the Confluence of Empires, as the HyperAIs also actively promote religious and ideological diversity. It should be noted that these cultures, religions and philosophies can be very different from one another in how they grow and exist: while some are very widespread and have existed for millennia, some are practiced by only a handful of individuals and exist for short periods of time (sometimes even just realspace seconds), especially when being practiced in more abstract and exotic environments by equally idiosyncratic sapients. Despite this, many cultures, beliefs and ideologies still have some common characteristics between one another. Importantly, it should also be noted that most religions and beliefs in the empire have rather intimate connections with science, and therefore have different focuses and approaches compared to most other external religions.

Some of the most widespread religions and philosophies within the Confluence are:

• Universalism: religion in which "god" is an internal entity existing within all sapients. Each mind must find their own god, whatever form they may take, in unity and coexistence with all other believers and sapient beings.
• OmniUplifting: philosophy that considers self-awareness the ultimate destiny of all lifeforms, and that all sub-sapients in the universe should be uplifted to sapience.
• Hedonism: ethical theory and philosophy stating that pleasure (in the sense of the satisfaction of desires) is the highest good and proper aim of all sapient life.
• Optimistic Nihilism: ideology and philosophy in which there is no underlying meaning to life and existence in general, and that said absecence of meaning simply creates an infinite number of opportunities for sapients to create their own.
• OmegaProgenitism: belief that all sapients throughout the universe are the same entity re-incarnated across different moments in time and space, and that the universe was created by an omega-point entity as an "incubator" for the omni-reincarnated entity to eventually reach the omega-point itself and achieve godhood.
• Universal Transophontism: philosophical and intellectual movement that advocates the enhancement of the sapient condition through ever-advancing and improving technology to greatly enhance the longevity, cognition, and well-being of all mindkind.
• Atheism: belief that negates the existence of any divine entity or god, as well as any metaphysical spiritual being.
• Vitaism: religion and belief that all life, regardless of whether or not it is physical or virtual, biological or synthetic, is sacred, that industrialization isn't in contention with life, and that sapient beings should use their industrialization to create as much space as possible and defend said spaces to maximize the chances of life.
• Materialism: ideology and belief that the material world has endless potential possibilities that can be manifested through action, and that everything in the universe is raw material for creation and for reshaping the world into a statement that expresses individual or collective aesthetics.

Languages & Communication Protocols

Ur'Soph is the official communication protocol within the Confluence. It is used for imperial edicts, announcements and communications by the HyperAIs, as well as being used for communications and exchanges between many clades and polities. However, hundreds of thousands of other languages and communication protocols exist alongside Ur'Soph, and are used by Imperial citizens. These languages can be based on vocal and/or sound-based communication, direct telepathic communication through neural implants or specialized systems, chemical-based exchanges such as pheromones, and many more kinds. Almost all of the most exotic "languages" are found and used within highly abstract virtual environments, especially those that require specialized mental modifications to be fully comprehensible by outsiders and non-natives. It is known that the HyperAIs also have one or more languages of their own, but how they function and what they "sound" like is not comprehensible to sapients.

Just like any other skill set or kind of knowledge, new languages that fit a sapients current morphology can easily be learned using special knowledge grafts and skill modules, although it is often still recommended to research and practice their use to better form new neural connections and therefore assimilate the newly-acquired information better and faster. Together with easy language acquisition, many citizens make constant or occasional use of universal translator technologies, such as special programs for their neural implants, genetically engineered computing lifeforms, direct genetic augmentation or portable devices and bots. Said technologies can and often also act as information providers and cultural guides for their users.

Economy and Industry

A nucleosynthetic forge in orbit of Reqmil, in the Viviverta System.

Economic System

The Confluence is a fully automated post-scarcity society, in which robot workers and molecular nanotechnology controlled by non-sapient artificial intelligent (often with oversight from the HyperAIs and occasionally regular sapients) perform all the functions necessary to fully maintain the society and economy of the empire, vastly exceeding their actual material demand. Notably large variation exists between the economic systems of different polities, that oftentimes incorporate elements and traits of different economic systems, such as direct provision, free-market trade, base incomes, ecological symbiotic networks, socialism, communism, capitalism and many more. The Sovereign (symbol: இ) is utilized both digitally and physically as the standard common currency within the empire, but many polities either have their own local currencies who “overlap” with the Saphirr, or don’t use any real currency at all and instead rely on other systems of material acquisition.

Industrial Capacity and Infrastructure

The Confluence's fully automated industry runs on vast arrays of advanced orbital infrastructure and various kinds of megascale constructs. Starlifting arrays, dyson swarms, nucleosynthetic forges, conversion furnaces, Q-ball synthesizers, antimatter farms, hawking radiators, industrial nanofabricators and even more advanced constructs such as plasma quenchers, extractor wormholes, metric forges and warp-bubble factories are all present within the empire's industrial complexes. All non-stellar celestial bodies in most heavily industrial systems, from small asteroids to large gas giants, have been completely dismantled through a variety of advanced technologies, with only stars remaining due to being enormously more massive.

Military

See also: Weapons of the Confluence (A1-0)

The Coempireal Armed Forces, often abbreviated to CAF, acts as the military of the Confluence of Empires. Despite most polities having their own fleets of ships, weapons and defense systems, the CAF acts as the protectors of the wider empire, having access to the most advanced and powerful technologies and weaponry available to the Coempireals, including HyperBrane Insertion technology for FTL travel, Q-Battery Warheads and many metric-based weaponry. The entirety of the Armed Forces are overseen and controlled by the Class-5 HyperAI known as Karheismas and eir subordinates, with no involvement from the empire's sapient citizens and its polities' fleets unless they directly wish to involve themselves. All coemperial warships and weapon or defense arrays are directly controlled and guided by dedicated military HyperAIs, who also oversee the sub-orbital operations carried out by a wide variety of para-sapient, mass-produced automated military units. Despite not having been involved in a military conflict for millennia, the empire continues to rigorously maintain its military, upgrading all vessels, constructs and weapons as soon as new technological advancements or more efficient designs are reached and achieved.

As of 0 BBT, the Coempireal Armed Forces wield 600.000 advanced and powerful warships belonging to multiple different classes, produced in the empire's main industrial centers and piloted by their own internal Class 1 to 3 hyper-intelligent AIs.

Technology

FTL Technologies

Void Bubbles

Traversable Wormholes