The Ghosts

The Ghosts, a loose alliance of cyborgs and AIs, are the only major fully posthuman culture in Sol System. The individuals and the phyle are a seemless blend of human and machine. Ghosts are adapted for existence in the vacuum; the phyle has no habitats. The Ghosts maintain close links with the Materialist Alignment, but also with other AIs and transhuman phylai.

Ghost architecture makes no concessions to baseline humans preferences for spin gravity or local two-dimensional orientations. Instead structures are designed on exotic or just plain weird aesthetic principles. The results are dizzying perspectives: disorientating, complex, sweeping and often breathtaking. All sections are open to space, with Ghosts living on isolated perches and vast latticeworks. Each region caters to a different posthuman sense of beauty, blending into others that are both wildly different and yet eerily the same. The overall effect is of clusters of jewellery tangled within immense webs of filigree.

Each Ghost swaps entire bodies as easily as Terrans changes clothes or gender. Humanoid, multiple-armed construction robot, mining station, mirrorwing, torchship, hunter-killer, sensor platform: a Ghost may become, for a time, any of these, and more.

Outsiders see the Ghosts as a glimpse into a Materialist future: harsh, cold as their plasteel carapaces, sterile, souless. The Ghosts themselves, unlike their Materialist allies, glory in the possibilities offered by the limitless permutations of bodies and senses. Many flit across the Belt as mirrorwings, tacking against the stream of sunlight, luxuriating in the strange vistas of the infrared, the ultraviolet, hard gamma photons and needle-sharp cosmic rays.

The future of Ad Astra