The Net
The ordinary net. What anyone can reach without knowing anybody: the reference, the news, and the rooms.
Information in the Sphere does not travel; it propagates, at lightspeed, in batches, and degrades on the way. There is no single net because there cannot be one: a thread on Terra Prime and the same thread on the Frontier are separated by up to an hour of light and reconcile badly when they meet.
What is on it
| What you find | |
|---|---|
| The Compendium | The reference: history, industries, technology |
| The Feed | Current dispatches. The public news of the Sphere, published and paid for |
| Chatter | The rooms. Trade channels, dock talk, ship-to-ship, congregation groups |
There is one more surface and it is not listed here. The Undernet runs on this same net, underneath it — see its own section.
The Feed 📡
Karael Entertainment operates the dominant public net feed, and Karael sells the ability to shape what the Sphere believes.
- Bias follows the money. Whoever pays Karael most this quarter gets the kindest coverage
- Independent operators are erased. Work done by a contract crew is credited to Ironveil or to "authorized security personnel"
- Placement is purchasable. Coverage can be bought
Chatter 💬
The rooms: trade channels, dock talk, ship-to-ship banter, congregation groups, the Belt rooms, the places the Crossed talk to each other. Local, low-latency, and closed — not encrypted, not secret, just uninteresting to outsiders and impenetrable without context.
- The only surface with real conversation. Same world, no meaningful light delay. Everywhere else is mail
- Accurate about small things and useless about large ones. A dock room knows exactly which berth the fire was in and has no opinion worth having about Concord policy
- You cannot buy your way in. You need a name someone will vouch for, which makes a chatter contact a relationship, not a purchase
- It corrects the Feed constantly and privately. People who were there say what happened, to fifty people, and it goes no further
Relationships
- The Undernet — the other network, reached the other way
- Communications — the lightspeed limit that shapes all of it
- Timekeeping — why a date is a claim, and what "a nine" means
- AstraCore — carries the traffic
Status
Universal, free at the bottom, and worth exactly what you pay for it.