NuBase: Farin Leski

Mese Farin Julian bar Leski-Arko (b.07081014[recorded] d.11301102). Farin Leski was an early lineage, late son of the combined House Leski-Arko. He was the founder, with Estes Meinhoff, of the Institute for Machine Human Interaction. His recorded birth date is generally assumed to be accurate, though contemporaneous photographs from the time of his death in car accident in 1102 show a man who appears to be approximately 40 years old.

NuBase: Estes Meinhoff

Estes Meinhoff (b. circa 1035 d.11301102). Estes Meinhoff was a computer science and machine intelligence researcher born in the Undercity in about 1035. There are no records of her birth or her education, however she is noted as enrolled on a Leski-Arko scholarship at ACU in 1048 and although this makes her a substantial prodigy, placing her birth any earlier makes contemporaneous photographic records of her age appear anomalous. While enrolled, she apparently came to the attention of Farin Leski and the two began a long and pioneering career of work in machine intelligence. She was the founder, with Farin Leski, of the Institute for Machine Human Interaction. Although pubic records considered accurate make her outside birth date a reasonable certainty, it has been noted that, at her death in a car accident in 1102, Meinhoff appeared much younger than her approximately 65 years.

NuBase: Institute for Machine Human Interaction

The Institute for Machine Human Interaction (IMHI) was a research and education foundation formed by Farin Leski and Estes Meinhoff in Axia in 1059. Leski and Meinhoff had been working together on machine intelligence projects, first for GEMINI and later, after a break with GEMINI, for Helical, a company formed and funded by Leski. Helical quickly emerged as the powerful force in cutting-edge commercial machine intelligence applications, eclipsing its much larger competitors in innovation, if not in commercial success, within a few years of its creation.

Once Helical was established, Leski and Meinhoff formed the Institute, the goals of which were to locate and educate talented individuals in the fields of machine intelligence and interface systems, particularly individuals from non-traditional backgrounds (like Meinhoff’s), and to conduct and support research into non-human intelligences (including, but not limited to MI) and the interactions between humans and those intelligences. The Institute was free, extremely well equipped and staffed (in large part funded by Leski’s personal wealth and Helical’s profits) and became haven for some of the best young minds in the field. It produced a number of important theoretical breakthroughs and educated some of the best-known and most prolific MI scientists of the time. The Institute was, in general, very open with its research, but it was believed to have a number of secret projects as well, some of which were said to relate to Leski and Meinhoff’s ongoing adversarial relationship with GEMINI. This allegation was never proved, however. The Institute closed down due to funding problems and internal leadership issues in 1105, following Leski and Meinhoff’s death in a car accident in 1102.

NuBase: Chartered Entity

A Chartered Entity (CE) is a corporation that is recognized across the entire Cordium (and in some cases beyond the Cordium in the CTG and Newmarket) rather than being limited to a single territory. Chartered Entities are extremely rare — each one is created individually by a treaty, called its “charter”. Though they are not typically subject to the normal rules governing corporations, they may have other restrictions built into their charters based on their purposes.

Chartered Entities are generally either very old (some have allegedly existed since The Passage), or relatively new — created in response to some issue that has grown to Territorial borders. The former are not particularly active in everyday life and most people will never run across them, but the latter are some of the most powerful megacorps on the planet.

NuBase: Giles, Robert M.

Robert M. “Pastor” Giles (c. 1033-1071): “Pastor” Robert Giles was a civil-rights activist and labor organizer born in the Undercity and killed in a car accident on Septian 13, 1071. Giles earned the name Pastor because of his uncanny ability to unite diverse groups of people and move them toward a single goal, rather than for any religious affiliation. Little is known about his birth or early life except that he was born in the Axia Undercity, purportedly in one of its worst neighborhoods, Sacherwood (a/k/a “Satch”), and spent most of his childhood in state facilities. Whether he was orphaned or abandoned, and whether those facilities were schools or juvenile halls is a topic of debate.

NuBase: The Alliances

Nuvel’s territories are organized into two alliances and one independent city-state.

The Cordium is a loose trade and military alliance of five territories: Axia, Traice, Oba, River and Casmi. Generally, travel and trade among citizens of Cordium territories is permitted, or less heavily regulated than trade with other territories. Cordium territories also generally avoid military confrontations and support one another if external confrontations arise. The Cordium alliances are fairly informal, however, and it is generally understood that, under the right circumstances, the Cordium could easily fall apart. Even now the members are not entirely peaceful and may compete aggressively to take and hold extra-territorial resources. Similarly, territorial alliances are in no way binding on the megacorps, which can and do engage in all-out corporate warfare between and within allied territories. Notwithstanding these “small wars”, the general outline of the Cordium alliance has held for at least 250 years.

NuBase: Larkspur

Situated around the Axia core are the three familiar towers of the Larkspur Atmosphere Stabilizers. These massive devices are responsible for breaking up the extremely large storms that occasionally gather in the atmosphere above Axia due to a quirk of Nuvel weather. Without the Larkspurs, the Axia Overcity would be subject to massive and highly destructive hurricanes once every five years or so and would risk being completely destroyed by a “perfect storm” about once a century. The Larkspurs use advance electrical and chemical measures to ensure that the storms break up before they can occur. This doesn’t mean that the weather in the Overcity is always good — far from it — but it does mean that the Overcity is saved from the most destructive storms.

NuBase: Safety Index

Originally described in a series of papers by legendary former Ganymede research chief Lyle “Croc” O’Dell (now retired), the Ganymede Observed Area Transient Safety Evaluation (or GOATSE) is an empirical measure of the relative security of a given neighborhood. It is now more typically referred to as the Safety Index or simply the Index. O’Dell invented various theoretical measures as well, but it was the observed measure that gained currency, initially for internal resource-allocation use within Ganymede and later in guidebooks and eventually everyday parlance.

NuBase: Ganymede Security Operations Corporation

Purportedly founded during the Passage (and certainly present, in some form, in all of the Cities of the Cordium from very early on), Ganymede Security Operations Corporation is one of Nuvel’s largest and oldest corporate entities. It’s Public Safety Division (PSD) is responsible, under contract with local and territorial governments, for security and police operations in all of the four Cordium territories and their major cities. Ganymede PSD officers are often identified locally as “police”, “cops” or “gannies”. In order to avoid the appearance of impropriety or favoritism, Ganymede PSD no longer offers private security services. As a result, it has access to various technologies and resources not available to private citizens for use in its police operations.

NuBase: Spinner

Traditional sources teach us that, by the time of colonization, Old Earth technology had advanced to the point where gravity was little more than a suggestion. Of course Nuvel has never had that level of technology, but we have rediscovered its roots, and for at least 25 years Ganymede has employed reduced-gravity or repulsion vehicles, called Spinners, for some police patrol work. Other megacorps have also had the technology, as have territorial and city military forces. Nothing larger than a tank or smaller than a motorcycle is ever known to have been fitted with anti-grav or reduced-grav technology, though it is certainly possible that such projects exist outside of the public eye. These size limits are believed to be a function of the limitations in power/weight ratios for the technology as currently understood. Absent major improvements in either power plants or the gravity-alteration technology itself, these limits are likely to be stable.