The World of Wild Space
Humanity never left the Sol system. It built the ships to reach the stars and found the reaching harder than anyone wanted to admit.
Earth. Mars. The dark between.
Wild Space takes place in a Sol system that never got any bigger. Four places hold every human being alive. Earth, Mars, Luna, and the stations around Saturn. Patrolled cargo lanes connect them, and the Lane Authority runs those lanes on paper. In practice they work like a protection racket with better branding.
Earth and Mars sit in a cold war that keeps getting colder. Shinsei Dynamics sells weapons to both sides. Chrome, the street word for cyberware, is everywhere, and every piece of it costs something. Nobody in this world is clean. The future did not fix anything. It moved the same problems to new places and added hardware.
Four places hold everyone.
Most of humanity lives here, under no single government. Successor states, corporate territories, and contested zones have spent most of a century negotiating, fighting, and sometimes cooperating. The cities are vertical. The upper levels are clean and expensive. Everything else lives below them.
Mars was supposed to be the clean start. It rebuilt most of Earth’s problems with local variations. The Martian Provisional Authority runs the planet and holds Gate Tharsis, the checkpoint every Saturn bound ship must pass. Earth has asked for joint control of the gate for twenty years. Mars has said no for twenty years.
Luna is money. Sealed resorts with engineered gravity cover the surface, and the maintenance crews who keep them running live in the habs underneath. No government rules it. A consortium of Earth corporations runs it and swaps its members every decade or so.
Cassini Station, Titan Platform, and Helios Ring. Everyone needs Saturn and nobody can hold it, which makes these stations the closest thing to neutral ground in the system. Researchers, long haul crews, and people who like the edges gather here. Runners feel at home.
Wild space.
Wild space is everything the lanes are not. No patrols, no fees, no inspections, and no official record of anything that happens there. Flying it is legal. Flying it with the wrong cargo to dodge a checkpoint is not.
Runners are the people of wild space. Smugglers, couriers, long haul drifters, and anyone whose business needs to stay off the books. They keep their own networks and their own rules, and those rules carry more weight than any government’s.
Wild space also holds the rumors. Ghost stations, lost colonies, ships that vanished from the lanes and turned up where they should not have. Some of those rumors are true.
Chrome.
Chrome is the street word for cyberware. It runs from a node in the palm that locks a pistol to one hand, to replacement eyes that see in the dark, to bodies with very little organic tissue left. People who go heavy get called decked out. People who stay unaugmented get called organic, and the word is not always kind.
The Remnant demands licensed installers. Mars is looser. The stations barely care. The further down a city you go, the rougher the chrome gets and the less any warranty means.
Every piece of chrome has a price. Past a personal limit, some users start to break down. The street calls it the static.
Nobody in the Sol system is clean. These are the names that move ships, set prices, and decide who gets to look the other way. Every one of them is corrupt in its own direction.
Record incomplete. Some names stay off the books.