The Galactic Mindsea Empire

The Galatic Mindsea Empire will arise in our galaxy a million years from now. It will be be founded as the union of three thousand ten planets spread across eight sectors of the galaxy. A large desert planet, Lal, is the imperial capital. The imperial year is equal to Lal's year, and Lalese is the Empire's offical language. There is no state religion, but many planets retain their pre-imperial faiths, languages, and traditions.

In order to overcome lightspeed limitations to galactic travel and communications, imperial scientists use Patternistics, a science that interprets familiar phenomena as patterns of more basic constituents. Tools to rearrange spacetime and release violent energies are found on Deep patternistic levels. Shallow levels expand spacetime and drain energy from living matter.

The Empire has a constitution that gives equal power to the Palace Branch and the Bureaucratic Branch. The Palace Branch consists of the Emperor and their major appointees: the imperial major and the mind-river of Lal. A separate race of warriors known as imperial minors make up armed forces stationed on every imperial world.

The Bureaucratic Branch consists of the Head of the Circle of Experts and nine hundred ninety-nine experts in all major divisions of knowledge.

The average imperial citizen needs never concern themself with Deep or Shallow levels, but enjoys a long happy life on Home Level in a community where buildings, furniture, clothing, vehicles, and objects are formed from microscopic programmed life-forms called glowworms. All glowworms respond to thought-commands and perform any safe and legal transformation requested.

Citizens enjoy antianging that keeps them strong and young-looking indefinitely, although the average citizen undergoes a mental shutdown called crystallization before reaching a thousand years of age.

Citizens usually spend their first hundred years in study, though they can begin working when they reach the minimum age of adult citizenship at twenty imperial years. Ten major divisions of job niches are Worker, Ranger, Healer, Artist, Engineer, Warrior, Player, Maker, Authority, and Official. Since Deep-level energy wells and glowworm systems provide all the material goods necessary for life, the most important niches are those that maintain Deep-level and Home-level systems, and those that protect citizens from external threats such as hostile aliens or enemy empires and internal threats such as glowworm plagues or rogue mindseas.

The abilitiy to perceive and manipulate Deep-level patterns is called mindsize, or mindpower. Workers who maintain Deep-level equipment and rangers who pilot interstellar or intergalactic ships require mindsize, as did the mind-rivers who made up a Deep-level communications network during the Decadent Epoch and the Contested Era. Mindseas have greater mindsize than these, and can subsume the identity of anyone they know through Deep-level superposition. The Emperor is nominally a mindsea, but in reality, they may have little or no mindsize.

Torsa horses are Deep-level beings that mimic Earth-origin horses when they emerge on Home-level. They enjoy bonding with citizens and racing on tracks engineered to intersect with the Deep. They can be summoned from the Deep in places where levels converge, which are called "The Plains of Possibility" wherever they occur.

Bioids are a special type of glowworm artifact. They resemble macroscopic living creatures and are usually programmed to act as servants or pets for citizens. Bioids may be indistingishable from animals or humans and are required by law to bear a mark identifying them as bioids. Animal-shaped bioids may be programmed to behave exactly as the animal they resemble, though most bioids use human speech. They may be programmed with superhuman intelligence and human emotional responses. They may not be designed to acquire mindsize. Mindsize requires the superposition of alternate futures, and having multiple possible futures would introduce uncertainty into bioid behavior and is illegal.