Letters from the Spiral Arms

Envelope

The clouds of Jupiter swirled underneath the elongated shape of the Lancaster.

The ship was a familiar sight in the vicinity of the gas giant. The fission powered vessel had been assembled thirty years before in the Selene shipyards and had lived many a life, from deep space miner to cargo ship and finally, glorified passenger vessel linking Io and Ganymede together. The Lancaster was a veteran of Jupiter's initial colonization effort, and one of the first vessels to be permanently registered under the flag of the Giants' Collective, the confederation of cooperatives that ruled over Jupiter and Saturn, far away from "Mother Earth and Sister Moon" as the locals called the old homeworlds. Sure, the Lancaster was old, it was cramped, it barely qualified to modern safety standards, it lost one heat radiator per month, but it was part of the collective consciousness of the Jovian community. The original Lancaster had required a crew of ten, but its most recent retrofit had been used to install a comprehensive modern autopilot which meant that the vessel could now be helmed by a single person. This lucky pilot was Yoko, a thirty-something Earther who had made Jupiter her new home some fifteen years prior. Lucky not only because the Giants' Collective trusted her with the helm of one of their most ancient ships but also because the vessel barely required more than two to three hours of work per day.

Granted, the Lancaster was an ageing piece of junk, but it was a stable ship that had been running the same routes for more than two decades. Its nuclear thermal reactor, albeit outdated, hummed with the reassuring regularity of an old companion. Even the cramped crew quarters weren't so bad after all, especially when there was only one tenth of the original complement. Yoko had turned her section of the ship in a cosy tubular apartment, complete with hydroponic flowers and two aquariums. It had nothing to envy to communal residences on Kashyapa Station or Vihara Gateway, the two Babylon-class cylinders that housed most of the Giants' Collective's population. The only downside to living aboard the Lancaster was that there was no artificial gravity when the ship wasn't under thrust, the old liner being unable to support a rotating ring section. Yoko didn't mind. She had not entered a sizable gravity well since her teenage years and was fully accustomed to zero-g conditions. Her monad made her grow muscle faster than normal to compensate for the lack of exercise, most of her bones had been reinforced by a targeted gene therapy and her natural eyes had since long been colonized by a lifelike biological q-aug making them impervious to the various effects microgravity had on internal eye pressure.

Drifting through the main section of her habitat, Yoko stabilized herself then snapped her fingers to turn her lectern on. The small e-ink device resumed her session, projecting a colorful UI on the curved wall in front of her. Yoko grabbed an apple, a can of water and stood back, watching direct messages and discussion threads flourish on the improvised screen. The Giants' Collective was unique among solar system polities in that it did not rely on the usual communal forums (or parliamentary structure for the USRE) but on a virtual agora, the Envelope. It united the communities of Jupiter and Saturn under a shared space where they could discuss and debate policies before they were implemented. Such systems existed elsewhere, in truth, but none of them were as refined and as official as the Envelope. The local discussion threads were naturally throttled in order to align them on the 7-hour light lag between Jupiter and Saturn. In many ways they worked like some kind of physical board were people would debate via long-form letters stamped on the wall. There was no upvote or downvote system in the Envelope, for it was not meant to be an assembly where citizens would vote. It was a forum made for debate and in the eyes of the Giants' Collective, the place where democracy truly resided. The Moon Communes and the USRE sneered at this. Many enthusiastic attempts at building e-democracies had met a messy end in the past but for some reason the Giants' Collective refused to die. The two superpowers, of course, found this incredibly frustrating.