Unique among known technological sapients, Humans did not directly copy Antecessor technology. They got by on their own wits and ingenuity for tens of gigaseconds (multiples of three centuries) until encountering the Gummis. Although they are now cooperating with Gummi engineers to merge Human and Antecessor tech, what they accomplished in the meantime has been remarkable.

The study and understanding of the underpinnings of life has allowed Humans to manipulate the basis of life itself.

Genetic Engineering: Gene editing tools allow engineers to modify living organisms, or even create new organisms de novo. Crops and livestock can be modified to survive under harsh environmental conditions, produce higher yields, resist diseases, and be more nutritious. Algae and bacteria can be created to grow in bioreactors and produce useful pharmaceuticals or chemicals. Novelty pets can be built, gene by gene.

Gene drives are genetic modifications that are designed to quickly spread through any population of sexually reproducing organism. The modification ensures that it is passed on to all of the modified organism's progeny, rather than just half as would be expected by Mendelevian genetics. In this way, a given genetic modification can be introduced to an entire population after several reproductive cycles. This tool can be used to drive populations, or entire species, extinct – for example, by ensuring that all offspring are male. In practice, designing an effective gene drive is expensive and a lot of work, and populations eventually evolve resistance to a particular gene drive so that to gain complete coverage a coordinated and sustained campaign must be waged, so it is only used when there is a strong motivation. But it has achieved some notable successes, such as the complete eradication and extinction of the malaria mosquitoes (Anopheles gambiae complex) and yellow fever mosquitoes (Aedes genus).

Environmental DNA, or eDNA, monitoring is a technique that allows for detection of life forms that are not easily located via traditional methods. Living beings regularly shed biological material, such as hair, skin cells, or mucous, that contains copies of that organisms genome. Analysis of sediment or water samples can detect this DNA, which can then be sequenced and used to discern what things are living nearby or higher in the drainage basin. EDNA monitoring is useful for conservation work such as monitoring the population size, species distribution, and population dynamics of species of interest. It can be used when introducing new species for ecosystem engineering efforts, or for detecting invasive species before they become widespread. In addition, it has proven vital in protecting the Verge against the Squirm menace. Major waterways and public wastewater are continually monitored for Squirm eDNA. Positive detection gives an early warning to Squirm activity and allows ramping up a full scale military and public health response. Monitoring of municipal waste streams also allows rapid detection of other public health threats in the form of infectious diseases and parasites.

It is illegal to use eDNA to track a specific individual without either their consent, the consent of a legal parent or guardian, or a warrant. If consent is obtained or a warrant is issued, the person's DNA sequence will be entered into the database of sequences to be searched for in the Verge-wide system of eDNA monitoring stations. Detection of a criminal in a remote watershed, however, is unlikely to trigger the coordinated effort to track down the source as detection of Squirm genetic material.

Germ line engineering: Before The Bump in the Night, it was not uncommon to modify the Human germ line. At first, it was used to prevent genetic diseases from being passed on to the next generation. As time went on, it was used to enhance one's offspring, in an attempt to make Humans stronger, more enduring, or smarter. It is arguable how much these latter efforts succeeded, as the more obvious changes tended to come with side effects that reduced the fitness of the child. In time, Human genetic engineering was being used for nothing more than vanity and decoration – pointy ears, exotic-looking eyes, furry skin, bumpy foreheads, tiger or zebra stripes or leopard spots, even striking blue or red skin could all be found in various populations. Since losing contact with Earth and the rest of the Earth-rooted network tree, this frivolity had largely passed. Interbreeding with the base stock and each other has diluted these exotic genes so that they are less common, but you still have occasional populations made up of designer appearances.

Agriculture: As described in the previous section, most food crops have been modified to better thrive in their environment and produce higher yields. Pests can be fought with gene drives or targeted diseases engineered to attack only the problem species. Most farming and ranching is performed to a large extent by robots, with sapient beings acting as overseers of the robot fleet. While a lot of farming is done in traditional fields outdoors, in some areas it is beneficial to grow food in enclosed, environmentally controlled buildings to maximize yields and reduce water use, fertilizer runoff, and exposure to pests and diseases. Conversely, many people living in urban areas tend a small plot or hydroponics garden to have fresh local food they grew with their own hands.

In addition to traditional staples like grains, orchard fruit, vegetables, beef, pigs, and chicken, agriculture in the Verge includes a substantial amount of aquaculture (farming seaweed and ranching fish and shellfish) and insect farming (most commonly crickets, mealworms, locust grasshoppers, and the Blaptica dubia cockroach). Synthetic foods are increasingly available, produced from algae or bacteria grown in bioreactors and processed into nutritious imitation foodstuffs or novel taste sensations. Meat from tissue cultures is also popular on many worlds, although it is largely limited to ground meat products like hamburger, sausage, and chicken nuggets. In principle you could grow a sirloin steak using the same methods used for regenerative medicine, but the cost would be prohibitive.

Medicine: advances in genetics, understanding development, and the nature of life mean it is possible to cure most diseases and recover from most non-lethal injuries, and in much less time than natural healing would take. Known infectious diseases have preventative vaccines or cures. Cancers can be fought and largely eradicated. Lost body parts can be grown in the lab and re-attached, providing full functionality after several megaseconds (months). Many metabolic, autoimmune, and lifestyle diseases can be cured or mitigated, from diabetes and dementia to chronic lack of exercise.

Diagnosis is greatly enhanced by advanced MRI and ultrasound scanners, as well as rapid, convenient tissue chemistry assays and on-demand gene sequencing. Combined with an expert system AI, a portable tool the size of a large book can identify most diseases and injuries.

Increased medical technology means that most people can be active and healthy for at least 3 to 4 gigaseconds (100 to 130 years), with expected lifespans on the order of 5 gigaseconds (160 years). Before The Bump in the Night, medical technology on old Earth had advanced to the point where it was thought that aging no longer led to death and disability, but the Verge has yet to return to that level of accomplishment.

Naturally, Humans have the greatest understanding of Human biology. Pannovas are sufficiently biologically similar that they can benefit from the same medical advances. All known sapient species are descended from the same worms and bugs distributed by the Antecessors, so some aspects of Human medicine work on other species. However, much does not and figuring out how to extend these gifts to the other sapients of the Verge is an area of active research.

Computation uses a combination of molecular scale classical computing merged with quantum processors. Classical circuits use a combination of electrical signals, light, and plasmons to convey signals and perform logic steps needed for computation. The performance of classical computing has plateaued for some time, with only incremental progress over the gigaseconds (decades). Most improvements have come from building quantum processors that can handle more and more qubits.

Machine learning algorithms allow computers to perform many tasks that were once the exclusive province of organic sapient beings. They can reliably recognize objects, respond to and use natural language, learn from their mistakes, and master skills involving uncertain information with complex changing rules and conditions. So far, although computers are remarkable at solving particular tasks, no computer has been made or programmed that has true volition and free will. They do what they are designed to do, although with machine learning they may do it in surprising and unexpected ways. A computer program may fool the naive into not realizing it is a computer, but with experience most people can recognize the tell-tale giveaways except in contrived situations.

Computation works to assist people in doing their jobs, freeing them from tedious and mundane tasks to allow people to contribute what they are best at – creativity, ethics, common sense, and high level decision making. In this way, computers greatly increase the productivity of a person for cognitive tasks, so that one clerk or researcher or police inspector can do the work of what used to require tens or hundreds of people.

Mechanical structures are commonly designed using computational mechanisms that removes material where it is not needed while reinforcing areas predicted to have higher stresses. As a result, the interior frame of machines often ends up looking rather biological, with organic interconnecting trusses and laticework that increase strength while lightening the total structure and using less material for manufacture.

A common feature found in many devices is folding or compliant mechanisms. Engineering methods partly inspired by the ancient arts of origami and kirigami have been developed that allow structures to fold or snap between two or more different shapes. This allows devices that can be compactly stowed but unfold into active shapes, such as self-folding clothes, self erecting tents, kayaks that can collapse down to be carried in a backpack, or wide area orbital mirrors that fold into small boxes for easy deployment.

Energy storage in the Verge typically uses Superconductive Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES) - a persistent supercurrent around a toroidal superconductive solenoid (a doughnut-shaped loop with electric current running around the doughnut tube going through the hole in the middle and then back to the outside circumference). This stores energy in a magnetic field that is entirely confined within the solenoid. The interaction of the generated field with the current that creates it acts to blow the solenoid apart, so the limit on the stored energy is set by the material strength of the support structure holding the solenoid together. Carboplast-carboweave composits are used for support – with adequate safety margins, this solenoid energy storage can store up to 20 MJ/kg. It can charge or discharge nearly instantly if required, with nearly 100% charge-discharge cycle efficiency.

The same technology can also be used for explosives with an order of magnitude higher yield than nitrated organics such as TNT, PETN, or nitroglycerine. The support structure of an over-energized solenoid is intentionally breached, allowing the field-current interaction to violently fling the particulate remains of the solenoid to produce a powerful blast and fireball. The detonation of a solenoid explosive is distinguishable from that of chemical explosives because a bright blue-white arc flash is produced at the moment of detonation.

Grid-scale energy generation usually uses non-orientable wormholes to produce antimatter on the fly and react it with matter while containing the dangerous penetrating radiation within the wormhole's contorted space-time geometry. This has long ago replaced nearly all other generation mechanisms for municipal electricity production without the pollution of burning coal or hydrocarbons, the long-lived radioactive waste of fission, the annoying intense neutron radiation of fusion, or the ecosystem-destroying impoundments of hydroelectric dams (although dams are still used for flood control and water storage – and where this is needed they may also include hydroelectric turbines to produce electricity as a side benefit). A rare alternative uses the near-critical collapse of a wormhole filled with boron-11 enriched boric acid to initiate proton-boron fusion, although these reactors tend to be even more finicky than those based on non-orientable wormholes.

Despite clean and cheap grid electricity, many people also produce their electricity locally. This is more common in rural areas where the penetration of the electric grid is lacking, and where the people tend to be more bloody-minded independent and less trusting of centralized organizations. Heterojunction photovoltaic cells allow durable solar panels of around 60% efficiency at turning light into electric energy for relatively low cost. Micro wind turbines and free-flow hydro turbines are also used as an alternative for when the sun is not shining in areas with access to regular winds or reliable water currents. Excess energy produced during sunny days or periods of high winds is stored in superconductive solenoids for later use.

Humans are the only known sapient species to have effectively exploited stimulated emission as a technology. Amplified light by stimulated emission – lasers – are ubiquitous within Human technology, with far ranging applications including sensing, communication, displays, computation, and data storage. This allows remarkable control over the properties of light, from diffraction-limited beams to complex visual holograms.

The most dramatic application for lasers is as a directed energy weapon. Human lasers are notorious for being able to shoot right through deflector screens (although affector-reinforced material armor is effective against them). The laser weapons of the modern Verge have still not caught up with the frightening effectiveness of those of old Earth, such that projectile weapons and disruptors are still competitive against them in direct-fire applications. Legacy weapons in good working order from before The Bump in the Night can sell for astronomical prices.

Manufacturing

Manufacturing in the Verge is mostly performed by automated factories, which print, shape, grow, and surface treat pieces to be assembled by robots when they are not manufactured in place. Smaller versions of these assemblers are common in most houses to make incidental tools, pieces, and devices; but industrial scale assemblers can make mass produced goods more cheaply. Convenience may trump price when you need a spatula or an odd-shaped fitting for your deck, but for large, complex, and expensive items most people buy retail.

One of the biggest changes from mid-21st century technology is that metals are rarely used as structural materials. Most structures are made out of exotic carbon allotropes or blends of nano-structured light elements engineered to optimize a particular set of material properties. These super materials are both much stronger and significantly lighter than steel. This gives, for example, automobiles that not only are lighter and more efficient, but whose fenders bounce back to their original shape without damage after a minor collision.

Surfaces can be engineered to have remarkable properties. Superhydrophobic surfaces instantly shed water as liquids simply roll off them with no adhesion or wetting. Self cleaning surfaces can act through superhydrophobic action allowing dust to efficiently be removed by the skittering water droplets, or photo-catalytically with light degrading grease, grit, and organic residue. Scratch and corrosion resistance are common. Other surfaces can be made instantly and reversibly sticky, mimicking gecko feet in adhering to a wide variety of materials and supporting significant weight. There are, of course, even other surface coverings that the sticky ones can't stick to, but these come at the expense of not allowing other surface modifications to be used.

Room temperature superconductors allow not only lossless transmission of energy, but high capacity electrical energy storage using toroidal solenoids.

Mining

Wormholes have made it easy to access other planets and asteroids. Metal asteroids, and the occasional planet lacking a crust, are rich sources of the siderophile elements – notably, gold, silver, platinum-group metals, tungsten, iron, cobalt, manganese, nickel, and molybdenum. With a solar mirror or NOW generator an entire asteroid can be zone-refined and the economical sections cut out and transported back to market via the wormhole (with the mass deficit made up by shipping an equal mass of slag, trash, or rubble the other way). The demand for platinum-group metals as catalysts has driven down the prices of other siderophiles. In the Verge, gold and silver are common and inexpensive. Gold or gold-silver alloys have replaced lead in applications where density or maleability are the driving considerations, since gold is both denser than lead and non-toxic.

The most valuable elements are the chalcophiles which are not also lithophiles or siderophiles in a different chemical form or oxidation state. These are most easily found on tectonically active terrestrial planets with oceans where geology and hydrology has refined and concentrated them over hundreds of petaseconds (billions of years) into patchy regions of valuable ores. These sought-after elements include copper, bismuth, arsenic, galium, mercury, indium, tin, antimony, selenium, telurium, tantalum, and zinc. When rich veins of valuable chalcophiles are found, entire mountains may be dug away or immense pits excavated deep into the crust to extract them.

Also valuable are the so-called rare earth elements: yttrium and the lanthanides. Despite their name, these are not rare. They are, however, difficult to extract from the surrounding rock and do not generally become concentrated into rich ores. Mining rare earth elements involves processing large quantities of rock, and consequently leaves behind a large expanse of tailings.

Robots are common tools used by Humans to perform repetitive, boring, or dangerous work, work requiring high precision or strength, tasks requiring long periods of attention, or just for novelty. There are many kinds of robot, ranging from automated lawn mowers or vacuum cleaners to hover drones, legged light cargo transports, and sophisticated androids that can perform nearly any physical task a Human is capable of.

Much of the challenge of producing useful robots are the computational algorithms needed for even simple, everyday interaction with the environment. Robots of the Verge are able to sense and interpret their surroundings, navigate, and automatically plan actions to interact with this sensed environment. This includes grasping and manipulating objects. Robots are engineered using bio-mechanical principles for efficient motion; movement seems smooth and natural.

There are various methods of locomotion available for robots – legs, wheels, hybrids of legs and wheels, tracks, tilt-rotors, quadrotors, airfoils with propellers, hoverfans … any contrivance used on a vehicle can be used for a robot, and others besides. The most common are legs, wheels, articulated wings, and rotors.

Robots often need to manipulate their surroundings. Many are simply equipped with a specialized tool related to their job – a shovel, jackhammer, squeegee and spray-bottle, lawnmower and weed-eater attachment, and the like. Others have general purpose arms or flexible tentacles.

Actuation is performed by electric motors or elastomer muscles. Pneumatics and hydraulics are only used for special-purpose designs.

When one robot is insufficient, it is common to find robot swarms. These communicate with each other, and possibly a central controller, for coordinated collective motion and action.

Higher-level cognitive function is provided either by a drone operator or a computer. Computers allow for truly autonomous robots, capable of performing tasks without sapient supervision. See the section on Computers and Electronics for details on the capability of computers.

Much as computers enhance the productivity of people for cognitive tasks by offloading tedious and repetitive chores, robots can greatly increase the output of a single person in physical fields such as manufacturing, mining, forestry, and agriculture. A single overseer can give commands to dozens or hundreds of robots who will carry out the physical labor instead of sapient employees. Thus, even though the population of the Verge is much less than that of modern Earth (there has only been enough time for the population to grow to several hundred million people), they can exceed the industrial output of 21st Century Earth by a considerable margin.

People use a variety of technologies to keep themselves entertained.

Holographic screens can produce realistic three-dimensional-seeming images, but only if the line of sight to the image goes through the screen. The easiest way to do this is make the screen look like a window into the world you are watching. However, sometimes holo-vids have the images come out of the screen toward the viewer, although this is only effective if the viewer is more-or-less in front of the screen.

Media for holoscreens are called holo-vids. They can either be filmed with live-action holo-cameras or simulated with advanced computer animation. Passive entertainment is consumed by downloading a holo-vid onto one's computer. It is generally agreed that large screen displays and high quality speakers from a home computer give a better overall experience than trying to watch on a handheld, but boredom and lack of opportunity (or just sheer laziness) often result in watching shows on the small screen. Some people prefer to watch through their HUD goggles or glasses, setting them to screen mode to produce the illusion of a large screen in a blank area.

Virtual reality is also a common way to escape the drudgery of the world for a while. The ubiquity of heads-up display goggles or glasses makes the display easy – just sit back and let your glasses show you the story. More participatory games or experiences let you walk around the room and look at things. These are largely limited by the ability to fool your sense of touch, balance, and proprioception. Tools to do this, called haptics, exist. However, the main advances in this field have come with combining Human HUD and VR technology with Antecessor affectors and Gummi electro-odorants to give a truly immersive experience. For a true sense of immersion in an artificial world, you can enter a VR room, which uses a combination of holo-screens and speakers on all the walls, soli-displays and affector haptics that can be projected throughout the room, electro-odorants, and affectors that can fool your sense of balance and acceleration. Household VR rooms are becoming increasingly popular as their price comes down to affordable levels. A well designed VR experience is nearly indistinguishable from actually being there. The most difficult aspect to capture accurately is simulating the behavior of other sapients in the environment. While computers are getting better at this, there are still usually cues that can tip off the savvy observer.

Species that rely more on their sense of smell than humans do are not as able to fully immerse themselves in the experience without using Gummi technology (which they developed separately from the Antecessor tech they also cart around). The Gummis, with their alien technology, often watch shows on soli-displays (affector-field produced shapes that manipulate light through the matter trapped in them). Soli-displays are not able to offer the same depth and sweep of spectacle and scenery, but they can be touched. Gummis don't get a real sense of immersion without the proper scents in the air (or on the things they touch), so they have developed quite an industry of mimicking odors for entertainment.

For music, a lifetimes worth of tunes can be stored on a hand computer and played over speakers or earbuds. True audiophiles will invest in much more extensive sets of equipment, of course.

Design principles of folding and compliant mechanisms are often found in the vehicles of the Verge. Ducted fans will change the shape of their ducts to optimize thrust and power consumption with respect to air speed. Wings will fold up, allowing aircars to be parked in a smaller area but will unfold when no longer hovering for more efficient flight. Even the humble bicycle has been affected, able to collpase into a structure that can fit in a briefcase.

Transportation beyond the wormhole network (see below) is handled by personal vehicles, mass transit, or walking (or, for Tweechis, flying).

Personal vehicles mostly consist of electric-powered wheeled vehicles. In dense urban areas, these may be scooters, motorcycles, or one- or two-person commuter pods. In more rural areas where the roads may be unreliable, off-road capability is common. To get between them, comfortable family cars may be used. Most personal vehicles have an electric motor at each wheel to allow all-wheel drive, and actively controlled suspension at each wheel for advanced traction control and improved all-terrain capability – if needed, the vehicle can "walk" with its wheels out of a sticky situation. Almost all vehicles manufactured in the Verge are capable of autonomous driving. Many people don't even know how to drive since their cars or pods do it all for them. The exception to self-driving cars are those manufactured for special sporting purposes such as racing or demolition derbies.

A popular alternative to the electric vehicle is the bicycle. The basic design has changed little in a dozen gigaseconds (400 years). Many bicycles are hybrids, using electric motors to either assist the rider or fully powering the cycle if desired.

Landed skycar with wings extended

Personal aircraft are common. Vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) designs allow use of aircraft from residential driveways and garages. Small one- or two-person airpods are common for commuting, while aircars or airvans are useful for getting the family around. Most aircraft use electric powered ducted tilt-rotors for propulsion, and either hover on their rotors (using them as rotory wings at high speed) or incorporate airfoils in their design for increased efficiency. Early in the Verge's history, people often needed to travel across large distances of rural or uninhabited land that was not economical to connect with a wormhole or train tracks. Hence, aircraft have become a cultural phenomenon of Human Space in the Verge.

Mass transit is the usual way to get around in urban areas. Subways move large numbers of people rapidly between stations, and surface buses take them to local stops. High speed trains move people between major cities. Since the same trains can also go through wormholes in the planetary or inter-planetary networks, buying a train ticket is the way to go to get anywhere any significant distance away.

An 8 person skycar with folded wings.

If you do need to use a personal vehicle to go long distances, you can buy a ticket on a wormhole ferry. This is a specialized train car designed to shuttle cars across a wormhole. Fixed wing aircraft large enough to carry passengers are not able to fit through a wormhole, so most personal aircraft using airfoils are made with folding or retracting wings.

Walking is the time-honored way of going places, and has never gone out of style. It is necessary to get to places where vehicles can't go, like in buildings. Many people also prefer to walk for pleasure, exercise, or to experience fresh air and see the scenery. In principle you could move through a wormhole under your own power, but the lack of gravity in the throat makes that difficult and the need for decompression between ends often makes it unwise. Some wormholes do offer float tunnels with ladder rungs for the curious, adventurous, or who don't want to shell out the money for a train seat.

The wormhole has revolutionized many aspects of Human society. Fundamentally, a wormhole connects one region of space-time with another, often distant, region. It consists of two mouths - where physical objects can go in and out - and a throat between them. The throat is a space-time tunnel, entering a mouth takes you into the throat and traversing the throat takes you out the other mouth.

Terminology Note: Wormholes are often described as a type of faster-than-light travel. This is not the case. Sure, you can go between two places faster than you ever could in your own proper time if you had gone through flat space-time, but at no point are you actually going faster than light. A wormhole is a shortcut through space-time, not FTL.

Wormholes are regions of space-time, not fundamentally different from the space-time going down the hallway from your bedroom to your bathroom. When going through a wormhole, there is no teleportation, you're not broken down into constituent particles and re-assembled on the other side, there's no glowing barriers across the mouths or swirly special effects as you go through. In a mass transit wormhole, as you approach in a train car the airlock doors slide open and the train passes through the mouth and into the throat, which you see stretching before you. It looks like any other subway tunnel, with tracks and electrical rails for guiding the train. As you enter the wormhole, gravity fades until in the throat you are in a microgravity environment. The train chugs through the throat (possibly decoupling into sections if it is longer than the throat, because of the need for airlocks). Soon you see the airlock doors at the far end, which open and you pass through. Gravity is restored and you are someplace far away in flat space-time from where you started.

Space-time with wormhole geometries is what's called multiply connected. Practically, this means that there are two equally equivalent ways of measuring time and distance – through the wormhole, and around the wormhole through flat space-time in the normal fashion. Both are equally valid. Standing at the grand steps of the entrance of Main Thistledown Station on Žemyna, in one sense you are hundreds of light years from Solace or New Carolina or the other worlds of the Verge. But in an equally valid sense, you are no more that a few kilometers away from any of the worlds directly linked to Žemyna.

Wormhole mouths are physical objects. They have mass, and momentum, and angular momentum, and kinetic and potential energy. Fling it forth and it follows a ballistic path, launch it into space and it follows a Keplerian orbit, just like any other body. Mass*, energy, momentum, angular momentum, electric charge, and all other conserved physical quantities are conserved locally. This means that if you enter a wormhole mouth, that mouth acquires your mass and momentum and charge and the rest. When you leave through the other mouth, that mouth loses your mass and charge, and acquires momentum and angular momentum opposite of what you leave with. This has several consequences:

• Wormholes must balance the mass going through them. A wormhole mouth's mass can never be negative – this would cause the wormhole to collapse. So over time, as much mass must pass one way as the other. Since transit wormholes have a total mass of hundreds of thousands of tons, you have a considerable leeway in this regards. Still, transit wormholes typically have pipelines going through them carrying ballast mass such as water. A heavy train loaded with platinum ore would be balanced by a flow of water in the other direction.
• Exploration wormholes, which are typically extremely small when projected, need to gobble up mass when they arrive at their destination before anyone can go through them. This can be air, dirt, gravel, or literally anything else - but if your first explorer masses 120 kg with his gear, you first need to suck in 120 kg of local material before he can exit. For practical purposes, you want to build up a safety margin of several times that.
• You can't project a wormhole into empty space and expect to do much when you are there. If you want to put a satellite into space with a wormhole, you either need to launch a wormhole mouth that weighs at least as much as that satellite, or you need to find a massive object up in space that you can bring back to ground in exchange for the mass of the satellite you are putting up.
• By conservation of momentum, when something leaves a wormhole mouth rapidly, the mouth gets kicked in the other direction. This means that you can easily turn a wormhole mouth itself into a rocket, by pointing a rocket engine through the wormhole. As usual, the mass of the rocket plume subtracts from the mass of the wormhole mouth (just as a normal rocket loses mass while it's propellant is being used up) while the mouth experiences the thrust of the rocket going through it. This makes the mathematics work out exactly the same as for a rocket. This is part of the way a wormhole projector works. After electromagnetically launching a wormhole mouth at high speed, the mouth is further accelerated, steered, and braked by using megawatt lasers focused through the wormhole as photon rockets.

  In an atmosphere, the mouth can suck in air on the side facing its direction of motion, the air can be routed to a jet engine back at mission control after passing through the throat, and the jet is then shot back through the wormhole to exit out the back of the projected mouth in order to generate thrust. This allows flying the wormhole through the air without decreasing its mass from the propellant flow going through it.

A wormhole is supported by a wormhole frame. Much of the mass of the frame exists within the wormhole throat, although you will need some support at any mouth ready to be used in order to hold it up and keep it in place. It is sometimes necessary to shrink one mouth down to a much smaller size than the other, resulting in a constriction of the throat near that end. This can be done for initially projecting the wormhole or for time balancing and maintenance.

The Antecessors developed technological maturity tens of petaseconds (hundreds of millions of years) ago. Their science is mostly important because the Mants, Gummis, and Squirm all rely on variants of it for their own tech. The Mants and Gummis managed to reverse-engineer examples of Antecessor tech that they found; it is unknown how the Squirm came to acquire Antecessor technology.

Affectors use a principle still mysterious to Human science to create controlled forces on fermionic matter at a distance. Fermions are the particles that make up atoms (electrons, protons and neutrons), and some kinds of radiation. In this way, affector technology allowed the Antecessors to manipulate the world around them. Affectors also interact with other affectors, allowing complicated non-linear phenomena to occur that can be useful for control of an affector field.

At low intensities, affectors are invisible. High-strength dynamic affector fields tend to ionize air, leading to a purplish glow within the field volume for low levels of ionization or a bright blue-white glare for dense ionization. Affector emitters tend to glow blue. Since ionization produces ozone in a breathable atmosphere, which in turn can produce nitrogen oxides and smog, extensive use of affectors powerful enough to cause ionization can lead to air pollution. Consequently, intense affectors are often closely regulated.

Affector fields can have arbitrary shapes. Often taking the form of beams or sheets, they can zig-zag, form complex geometric patterns, and enclose odd-shaped volumes if engineered to do so.

Affector-Conductors: Affectors can manipulate electrons so they flow through passages in the fields without resistance. This allows efficient energy storage and transport, and forms the basis of all Antecessor electronics and computing.

Deflectors: A deflector is a screen that prevents matter from passing. It can be weakened or collapsed if it is hit sufficiently hard, but will quickly regenerate if pressure is not kept up. Deflectors are normally of sufficiently low intensity to be invisible, but adaptively strengthen when stressed so that they may show blows they intercept with a region of ionized air.

Deflectors will reflect all incoming neutron radiation. Consequently, it is best to check with a safety supervisor whenever bringing deflectors into a facility with fissile material. Enclosing plutonium or enriched uranium with a deflector screen is uniformly a bad idea.

A deflector that interpenetrates existing matter can make the matter much stronger and tougher. The matter will resist cracks, dents, cuts, abrasion, and impacts. By trapping the ejecta produced by an incident high energy laser, they can impede the laser's ability to blast through the material. Deflector reinforcement allows for resilient, high strength structures made with remarkably little material.

Disruptors: A disruptor breaks apart matter in its beam by stretching and squishing it (most disruptors stretch in one direction transverse to the beam while compressing in the other direction, and rapidly reversing the stretch-compress directions back and forth). They are commonly used in power tools and machine shops for shaping matter - a disruptor can easily drill and cut through most materials. By enclosing the disruptor beam in a deflector sheath, you limit damage beyond the radius of the beam - a well tuned disruptor can make cuts only microns wide.

Disruptors also make devastating direct-fire weapons. Neglecting the deflector sheath, the beam smashes anything it hits. Bones will be broken, organs ruptured, and tissues bruised and shredded. Rigid materials will shatter into fragments. Different species have developed unique characteristics of their disruptors since adopting the general principle from the remains of the Antecessors. Gummi disruptors are notable for their ability to collapse other affector fields. Those designs from the Zox library use concentrated "blaster"-style beams that flash the matter in their region of impact to plasma to explode it out of the way.

Repulsors: A repulsor pushes away on all matter within a certain volume. By Newton's third law of motion, that matter also pushes back on the repulsor emitter. Consequently, repulsors are useful for making vehicles that float some distance above the ground, producing low ground pressure, allowing the vehicle to cross difficult terrain or even water. They are also used for low-resistance bearings, lubrication of moving parts, and impact buffers.

The energy in an affector field increases with the volume they act over. Consequently, repulsor fields generally operate over the minimum volume needed for operation in order to keep energy costs down. Once a field is produced, it can be maintained with a minimum power expenditure, but interactions with matter are always going to be somewhat lossy requiring additional power draw to keep the field in place.

For vehicles than need to operate at altitudes where a repulsor cushion is not practical, the repulsors can be set to operate on a wing-shaped area to push directly on the air. This acts as a combination wing and propeller, similar to the rotary wing of a helicopter but much less noisy and of arbitrary shape.

Tractors: A tractor pushes or pulls on a distant object, or in many cases holds the object in a potential minimum that tends to restore it to a fixed location. Tractors find considerably use in industrial applications, moving heavy equipment, mass streams, or hazardous material. They are also useful for emergency response situations, such as rescuing people from several stories up in a burning building. Tractor-based launch beams are used for flinging payloads or placing satellites in orbit.

By Newton's third law, pushing or pulling on an object produces an equal and opposite force on the tractor emitter. So pushing on an immobile object will only end up pushing the emitter away. Trying to use a tractor beam to levitate or otherwise apply a transverse force to a distant object requires large amounts of torque. If too much torque is needed, it will just rotate the emitter and whatever it is attached to instead of moving the desired object. This latter effect is commonly mitigated by having the scattered tractor beam produce a repulsor cushion around the tractored object, resulting in it levitating a short distance off the ground. Lifting the object further than its repulsor cushion, or applying perpendicular forces, must still meet the requirements for adequate torque.

A tractor beam, like a repulsor cushion, takes energy to form, with more energy required the larger the volume occupied by the beam. Because of this, the force of a tractor, especially on distant objects (which require a higher volume beam), tends to ramp up over time as more energy is pumped into the beam. Once the beam is energized, the energy can be sapped away when it does work on the objects it is affecting, requiring more energy to be put into the beam to keep up the force. Alternately, the beam can be energized enough to do its job and the power supply cut off (except possibly for basic maintenance power). The energy in the beam can then continue to provide a decreasing force on the object over a considerable duration as the beam does work on the object but grows ever weaker.

Computation

The Antecessors used affectors to build the complicated logic structures needed for computers. They never seem to have developed quantum computers, but exploited massive parallelization of classical computation with the easily-reconfigured affector processors.

While the Mants and Gummis can make computers similar to those of the Antecessors, they lack the algorithm development that 2 petaseconds (60 million years) of existence afforded the Antecessors. Gummi-made computers typically make extensive use of com-grade wormholes that allow them to physically locate different parts of the same processor in different locations,

The Antecessors made some of their equipment from substances that seem indestructible. It is made of normal hadronic matter, but reinforced by affector fields to make it remarkably strong and resistant to weathering. The hadronic component can be destroyed like any matter, by heat or mechanical force. But it is made of sophisticated self-repairing structures, somewhat akin to life, that put it back together in its original configuration. Energy demands are met with non-orientable wormhole generators, requiring minimal fuel. In this way some antecessor materials – including occasionally entire artefacts or structures – have been able to survive, nearly unscathed, for more than 16 petaseconds (500 million years).

So far, the Gummis and Mants have not been able to reproduce this self-repairing aspect of Antecessor technology, although they do use affector-reinforced materials.

Antecessor robots are as much affector as matter, usually with several independent pieces floating separately connected with affector fields. With their self-repairing materials, many Antecessor installations are still maintained and guarded by their robots.

The sapients which have based their technology on that of the Antecessors do not always display this level of sophistication. The robots of the Zox are either monolithic in construction, hovering above the ground, or articulated with limbs attached to the body (but still hovering on repulsors for mobility). Gummi-tech robots are closer to that of the Antecessors, although they often have a tendency to go overboard with separating the individual material components into isolated units (the greater flexibility offered by very many parts allows the robots to navigate the twisting, confined labyrinths of Gummi architecture).

Antecessor wormholes and their technological descendants are held open by affector fields. This makes them more flexible than Human wormholes. Like Human wormholes, you can use them to build traversable wormholes and non-orientable wormholes. You can project them, although this is done with affector launch beams rather than electromagnetics. However, there are a few other capabilities of Antecessor-descended wormholes.

Com Wormholes: The com wormhole allows rapid, long distance communication. A microscopic wormhole is formed and threaded with affector-conductors. The conductor is used to transmit messages from one end to the other. Since messages through a com wormhole do not travel through normal space, they cannot be jammed or intercepted (except by tapping the wormhole itself). Com wormholes can be used to communicate between mouths no matter the distance between them in normal space.

Since com wormholes are often used in a wormhole-rich area, specific features are engineered in to avoid causality related accidents. The wormhole throat is extremely stretchy. Instead of immediately breaking, the throat will stretch out to lengthen the time it takes for signals to get through. A com wormhole throat can be stretched out to several million kilometers in length before snapping, allowing on the order of ten seconds of leeway before nature puts down the boot. Meanwhile, affector fields will start spinning the mouth of a stretched wormhole in a tight circle at relativistic speeds, producing time dilation at one end to bring the entire wormhole distribution into causal compliance.

Despite being built for resilience, com wormholes are designed to fail quickly in the event a causality loop becomes unavoidable. They are meant to be carried with a person, after all, and a massive flux of quantum oscillations passing through that person is not going to be good for his, her or its health.

Gummis evolved on a world with a thick atmosphere of mostly helium, neon, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide. Although it had enough oxygen to breathe, the low relative concentration of oxygen meant that fire could not burn. While Gummiland was unusually rich in Antecessor ruins and artefacts, early Gummis could not always rely or unserstand these sometimes dangerous and always mysterious alien works. Thus, they had to develop an entire technology base that did not rely on fire before they came to be able to understand and engineer basic Antecessor tech. Much of this technological base is still in use.

After Gummis decyphered some of the secrets of Antecessor technology, they nonetheless retained many of the techniques developed earlier and, in fact, continued to refine them. This particularly holds for capabilities that Antecessor affectors and wormholes cannot meet, such as medicine and the life sciences.

Early Gummis, much like Humans, lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers. Eventually, some bands entered into the symbiotic relationship of domestication with other Gummiland animals. Many of these animals were phototrophes, themselves containing symbiotic bacteria that could capture sunlight and turn it into food much like Earth plants. Other domesticated animals could be used as livestock, for traction, meat, and nutritious secretions. There were many animals that Gummis domesticated for the production of materials. This could include integument (like hide or fur), structural members (the Gummiland equivalent of bone, horn, or wood), fibers, or mineralized layered secretions such as nacre or silica shells.

When animals became domesticated, Gummis would selectively breed those with desirable characteristics. This led to the development of many breeds or strains of domesticates that specialized and enhanced those characteristics, and minimized undesirable traits. Gummis quickly came to understand the process of selective breeding, and applied it to guide the evolution of their domesticated symbiotes into ever more useful strains.

Many of Gummiland's animals were colonial animals, like the Gummis themselves. This provided additional methods for the Gummis to manipulate their domesticates. By guiding the development and placement of desirable zooids they could sculpt or mold growing animals into engineered forms, or to have specific engineered functions. Splicing together zooids from different but compatible species allowed even further possibilities. The susceptibility to Gummi engineering would then be synergistically enhanced by selective breeding, to develop strains that could more easily be manipulated.

Gummiland colonial animals are thought to be the evolved descendants of engineered biological tools. As Gummi technology advanced, they discovered at least some of the original methods used to control and modify these colonies. This gave their biological science enormous versatility, but focus on zooid engineering retarded development into understanding of the methods of life on the cellular level such as gene engineering.

Colonial organisms are difficult to "kill," the individual zooids are as vulnerable as any other animal, but the colonies themselves lack single point of failure organs and can quickly reconfigure to overcome the effects of injuries. Consequently, Gummi weapons developed for hunting and predator defense tended to focus on biochemical toxins rather than causing mechanical injury. Gummis have access to a large library of poisons and venoms, as well as methods to engineer zooids to reshuffle toxin bases and modify existing toxins to produce novel and tailored venoms. Early research into biochemical toxins branched out into technologies for bio-active chemicals and pharmaceuticals in general, leading to a variety of useful medicines and other biological products.

As colonial beings, Gummis are naturally resistant to severe injury. A Gummi's zooids can rearrange themselves to repair most damage, and clonally reproduce to regenerate lost body parts. Gummi medicine treats injury merely by encouraging this process.

Of more concern are various varieties of infectious illnesses, toxins, and inherited diseases. Gummi medical technology is able to cure many of these ailments, although it is not yet up to the standard of Human medical abilities applied to Humans and Pannovas. Since contact, Gummis have adapted many Human disease treatment methods, such as advanced antibiotics and antivirals produced by an understanding of genetic mechanisms rather than the trial-and-error method of reshuffling bio-active libraries from engineered zooids, and are beginning to roll out some gene surgeries based on Human genetic engineering applied to the Gummi genome.

Individual Gummi zooids will age and die, but the colony can replace its members and potentially live indefinitely. The main limit to Gummi immortality comes from replacement zooids which vary enough from the original founding stock that they do not contribute to the health, operation, functionality, and well being of the colony. These free-loading zooids can quickly reproduce and grow out of control, in a process akin to cancer in cellular life forms. With appropriate treatments and surgeries, however, the malfunctioning zooids can be removed. In this way, a Gummi with access to health care can have an indefinite lifespan.

The most advanced and notorious Gummi technology is their mind surgery. They have a deep understanding of how their ganglion zooids connect and cooperate to create rational thought, emotions, and store memories. By altering these connections, targeting specific ganglions, and inducing the production of new ganglions with the correct properties that are inserted into the colony, they can change a subject's personality and habits of thought, induce targeted partial or total amnesia, and add or remove behavioral traits. By mapping an individual's ganglion zooid connections, they can later "resurrect" a personality from that Gummi's still living body if it suffered sufficient trauma to damage or destroy its mind. Most Gummi mind surgery is elective, or undertaken with informed consent under the advice of a doctor. This can help a Gummi to overcome anxieties, depression, or phobias, gain confidence, heal from the Gummi equivalent of post traumatic stress disorder, or cure various mental illnesses. However, Gummis will also use this technology to rehabilitate criminals by removing the impulses that lead them to crime, or implanting inhibitions toward causing harm or loss to others. Many Humans find this practice disturbing, especially since Gummi judicial practice often has elements of mob vigilantism.

Recently, Gummi and Human researchers have found that the same network theory of cognition that applies to the Gummi mind also applies to minds of cellular-based brains. Research is being carried out on using mind surgery on other species, and some clinical procedures have been implemented for certain psychiatric conditions of Humans, Mants, and Pannovas.

[Dr Naowhrloo] Ooh - look how pink and squishy it is! Fascinating how you beings can think using electrochemical networks.
[Dr Cho-Wilkinson] It's the way we work, Nao. Hand me that fiberscope, would you?
[Dr Naowhrloo] Sophie! Check this out! If I poke this part, her leg twitches!
[Dr Cho-Wilkinson] This one's a male, Nao, so his leg. And please stop playing with the patients.
[Dr Naowhrloo] Let's cross-wire the amygdala to the visual cortex.
[Dr Cho-Wilkinson] No.

Without fire, Gummis could not use high temperatures to reduce metal ores to metal. Instead, they used electric bacteria. Bacteria of this sort can be found on nearly all life-bearing worlds, such as the Shewanella oneidensis variety found on Earth. Electric bacteria have filamentary structures that are good biological conductors, and use these to take and give electrons from the environment. In particular, they can use metal ores as an electron sink in order to metabolize food molecules. Early on, Gummis learned that mixing some kinds of metal ores with food and an electric bacteria culture allowed them to produce metals. The later domestication of voltage producing animals (that used mechanisms similar to Earthly electric eels, knifefish, and torpedo rays) allowed the Gummis to provide an electric potential that allowed their bacteria films to reduce many other kinds of metals not previously accessible. Gummis eventually came to develop methods to directly reduce metal to form structures in place, using elaborations on this basic method. Rather than machining metal into shapes, they tend to "grow" metal structures into their final forms.

Gummis also make extensive use of biological excretions to form hard mineralized structural materials. Many of their domesticated animals have been selectively bred to modify their shell-forming tissues into structures that can lay down layers of shell material where it is desired. The most common such structure is nacre, a composite of stacked calcium carbonate plates bound together by elastic biopolymers and noted for its combination of strength and toughness. The Gummi method of bio-excretion makes nacre an economical bulk structural material used for walls, floors, ceilings, doors, and similar surfaces. Gummis will often use nacre where humans use wood, concrete, or drywall. However, they have a variety of other materials that can be bio-deposited in a similar way. Silica shapes can be grown to form glassware, lenses, or chemically resistant surfaces; silica plates bound by high strength biopolymers can form a higher strength alternative to nacre; and so on. In a similar fashion, other animals have been bred to produce fibers on demand so that Gummis can grow high strength cables or mats using silk or nanocellulose.

In a similar fashion, Gummis can use domesticated animals to lay down surface layers. These may be passive structures that, for example, repel water, or they may be active, living surfaces that grow, respond to their environment, heal damage, and perform functions such as cleaning and structural repair. Because Gummi structures can be grown or laid down in situ, they tend to have a more flowing or organic look than the rectilinear appearance of Human buildings. As Gummi structures are often living, and can respond to stress (or the lack thereof) by laying down additional material where strength is needed or resorbing material where it is not, which can produce intricate pneumatized and biological latticework that efficiently distributes loads.

When extreme strength-to-weight materials are needed, Gummis use machined and manufactured carbon-based nanostructures copied from the Antecessors, which are functionally equivalent to those produced and used by Humans. Unlike Humans, Gummis often augment these materials with affector fields to increase their performance.