Timekeeping The polities descended from the Republic of Is do not use days, weeks, or other
terrestrial dating systems other than for historical or archaeological purposes; however, the classical second has been retained as the basis of timekeeping.
Second : The time taken for light to travel
299,792,458 meters in vacuum.
Kilosecond : 16 minutes
Diurn 100 kiloseconds : 27 hours, 1 day and 3 hours
Megasecond (Cycle) 10 diurns : 11 days and 6 hours
M-year 30 megaseconds : 337 Earth days, 11 months
Gigasecond : approximately 31 Earth years
Terasecond : approximately 31,000 Earth years (half age of
human species)
Petasecond : approximately 31,000,000 Earth years (half elapsed time since end of
Cretaceous era)
Transport technology T-gates : (Transporter gates). These are the ubiquitous point-to-point wormholes which link everything from polities that are
light-years apart to rooms in habitats to each other. They are also used to enable one to access private storage spaces, even from clothing. Unlike the A-gates, traffic through these is instantaneous and unfiltered, though they can be fitted with
firewalls at a variety of strengths.
A-gates : (Assembler gates).
Nanotechnological arrays that can be used for creating all kinds of objects, goods, and substances very quickly, molecule by molecule, working from a wide series of templates. They are also used by the
posthuman populace to create
"backups" of themselves, redesign their physical bodies to whatever parameters they wish, long-distance travel between far-flung polities, and for medical purposes, making them, if they wish to be, virtually immortal. Military-grade versions exist which can be used to download polity-inbound traffic, analyse it for threats/contamination, reroute it to a
DMZ, and then reassemble it if all is well.
Mobile Archive Suckers : Large spacecraft or mobile habitats which travel at slower-than-light speeds between the
brown dwarf stars which most polities orbit. Self-contained and self-sufficient, fitted with their own A-gates, they are fuelled by
plasma piped-in by T-gate from nearby stars. Generally, the ships' systems are not connected to the galactic network at large. Both crewmembers and passengers can, if they do not wish to experience the long subjective timescales of travel by this method, disassemble themselves in an A-gate and "sleep" throughout the journey.
Population centres The vast majority of post-humanity lives in massive artificial cylindrical
habitats, along with a few domed colonies on the planets, moons, and asteroids orbiting brown dwarf stars. These can be linked to each other by T-gates, creating a huge network of interconnected societies, known as the
Republic of Is.
History For a variety of reasons, post-humanity has forgotten the history of events preceding, during, and just after the
singularity (the "acceleration") as it occurred back in the
Solar System, from around 1950 to 2040. They refer to this period as the
Dark Ages. Data-storage methods changed so rapidly that proper backups weren't made; much data was encrypted, or stored on perishable media; many individuals hailing from the period excised their memories too many times, creating a historical
"bias"; and many "censorship wars" were fought, with computer
viruses and
worms changing or erasing what was left.
Censorship wars A long series of these wars plagued post-humanity, starting around 300 years before the novel begins, lasting for almost a century (two centuries, according to
Yourdon). Censor factions used A-gates to propagate redactive worms throughout the Republic's networks, which targeted historical data and even memories of why the wars had started in the first place. Historians and archaeologists were singled out for annihilation. These events placed a great strain on the political cohesiveness of the Republic of Is – but worse was to come.
Curious Yellow Persons unknown created a worm of enormous destructive capability –
Curious Yellow. Like previous worms it used the A-gates to spread, but it also used the people who travelled with/uploaded to them as transmission vectors. An infected A-gate would surreptitiously delete swaths of personal memory from a victim, particularly memories associated with historical knowledge of pre-Republic times. It would then force a copy of its
kernel into the victim's
netlink (the
Cyberware which everyone uses to connect to and communicate with the gate networks) along with some
bootstrap functions. The infected victim, upon encountering a "clean" A-gate, would then feel compelled to switch the gate into
debugger mode, enter a set of commands, then upload him/herself, after which the gate would execute the infected boot-loader in his/her netlink, copy it into its
working set, and thus become infected in turn. When a set amount of gates in a network became infected, they would begin communicating with each other and create privileged instruction channels which could be used by shadowy controllers with the correct authentication keys to control them remotely. They could defend themselves against attack, build and direct weapons to selected targets, and netlink to any number of T-gates. Eventually, the republic crumbled under the pressure, converting into a series of isolated, heavily firewalled polities. Curious Yellow is derived from a paper on worm design by
Brandon Wiley: Curious Yellow: The First Coordinated Worm Design.
Recovery However, there were those who fought back. A variety of militia groups formed, among them the
Linebarger Cats, who specialised in esoteric strategies and
psyops. They formed and acted on a plan to "repurpose" the worm, rewriting its code as an "immune system" and introducing it, slowly but surely, into the A-gates. Millions died as the worm fought back, but they eventually succeeded. After
Curious Yellow's destruction, a number of
Quisling dictatorships formed, using hacked versions of the worm to spread in an attempt to form separatist dystopias, populated by brainwashed populations led by sinister "cognitive dictators". But these were mopped-up one-by-one, and the galaxy returned to a semblance of normality with the firewalled polities building "clean" A-gates to carefully re-integrate. The
Invisible Republic became one of the largest new networks. ==Major characters in
Glasshouse==