Olympos

Around the gravitational well of Olympos, the home of the Divine residents of this solar system, orbit two suns, the first a G-type star and the second F, both yellow.  Each of them draws around it, its own set of celestial bodies, occasionally stealing from one another.

This makes the Olympos system particularly welcoming for life in general, albeit with a few downturns and surprises.  There are no less than five planets that can be comfortably inhabited, which in alphabetical order are Argos, Athens, Knossos, Sparta and Thebes.  They indigenous population is human, collectively known as Hellenes, although other species do walk among them, having dared the journey between the stars at some point in the last couple of millenia.

 

Nothing about the current state of the Olympos System makes any sense without understanding Mnemosynê.  The technology was born around two hundred years ago, and it was a game changer.  It became possible to implant any human being, upon birth or at least very shortly afterwards, with a biological recording device, that would literally become the mirror of their mind and soul.  Upon death, the device could be removed, and implanted in any willing candidate, in which distinct personalities would then exist, never coalescing, but able to draw upon one another, simultaneously perpetuating wisdom across generations, and ensuring a theoretically unlimited lifespan.

Fairly quickly, it was decided for both ethical but also for reasons of neuro-genetical comptability, to restrain the implanting procedure within family lines.  This extraordinary technology produced an astounding set of psychological and then social shifts, and was generally considered to be the best thing since sliced artos.  It did lead to a few quarrels about which sibling would get to carry Mum around in their head - or not, as the case may be - but various social and economic mechanisms dealt with that quite comfortably.

As any film buff however knows, at some point, someone at the family reunion makes a snarky comment, and all hell breaks loose.  The more guests, the greater the chaos will be.  So it turned out with mnemosynê.  As of the fourth generation, people started to go mad, the symptoms ranging from twitching eyeballs to berserk and literally bloodthirsty rage.  As entire civilisations began to gaze upon the failing of their virtual immortality, and fall apart at the seams, various attempts were made to deal with the flaws of the process, from pre- and post-implant personality hacking, to intermittent or permanent shutting off of implants, but nothing worked, and the problem worsened to the point where cannibalism outstripped heart disease as the primary cause of death.

Only a handful of individuals, or more accurately, family lines proved capable of integrating the personalities of innumerate ancestors with no apparent psychological fallout.  The more enterprising of these rented out their services, legal issues notwithstanding, to absorb personalities from outside their lineage.  They made ludicrous amounts of money doing so.  Some did eventually go mad, suffering from the mental equivalent of exploding at the seams, but a select few survived.

With wealth came, naturally, power, and the Dynasties were born, supplanting whatever political organisation had preceeded them.  Other, more physical, culling processes narrowed the Dynasties down to one or two on each planet.

Once these had accrued enough wealth and power to move entirely under their own steam, they ceased offering their mental mettle to the hoi palloi.  Obviously they did not proceed with too blatant a disregard for those who had set them upon their thrones : instead, the Dynasts declared - acting together in one of the very rare occasions of their history - that for the good of humanity in the Olympos System,  mnemosynê transfer was no longer permitted, outside (naturally) of the Dynasties themselves.  Of course, rather than dashing all hope of immortality and provoking dramatic unrest, they took a firm grasp on it, wrapped it up in symbolism and mysticism, and projected it into a far distant, but nonetheless curiously certain future.

The devices continued to be implanted; but as of that day, when a human died, their recording devices were extracted, coated for preservation in a solid circle of metal plating bearing a symbol of their home planet, and placed in their mouths. The body was then wrapped in a shroud, and launched into space, where the guidance system embedded in the coin-shaped metal would propel it to its destination.

That destination was a planetoid named Hades.  All of the dead, no matter their home planet, would congregate there, hundreds, then thousands, eventually millions.  The Dynasts ensured everyone else that they would labour tirelessly to one day perfect the mnemosynê technique.  When that inevitably happened, the dead would rise and be liberated. Hope is a powerful ally when it is on your side.

In the meantime, to guard against the inevitable temptation, the Dynasts - working together for about the last time in their violent history - surrounded Hades with an artificial belt of micro-asteroids, each bearing a proximity mine.  Portrayed as an encompassing river in popular representations, the stochastic movement of the micro-asteroids that made up the Styx interacted with the software in the coin to offer safe passage only to those who bore one, and that could only be someone who was dead.  Anyone and anything else was reduced in short order to dust and a floating red smear lost in the immensity of space.

 

In the Olympos system, it is the era of the Dynasts.  They are often quite sprawling families, but at their head is a basileus, who is the sum of the personalities he or she has mentally incorporated.  At the forefront are generally those of his direct line, in the background the more anonymous individuals that his line offered immortality to, in exchange for their fortune.  Some Dynasts have secretly sought to have these now extraneous minds suppressed, but it always fails, and the price of failure is death.

The way mnemosynê works, is not the latest personality ingesting his predecessors; they do not form a sort of sitting council in his or her head.  Neither, unless the process goes awry, is the result a form of schizophrenia.  All the personalities coexist, and they come to the fore with a frequency that definitely depends on their force of character, and also the strength of their bond to the individual who is physically carrying them all.  Such is the potency of this phenomenon, that the Dynasts in general, and the basilei in particular, are named according to the prevalence of these different persona.  The current ruler of Thebes, for example, the basileus of the Labdacide Dynasty, is named Oedipus-Antigone-Etéocle-Polynice-Jocasta, in the body of a princess named Ismène who is not, currently at least, one of the foremost personality expressions.

 

The Ostracised

A certain number of crimes in the Olympos System, which also depend on the social status and age of the perpetrator, and also to a certain degree on political whim, are punished by ostracism.  It was, at least initially, a sentence of living death, for the ostracised are shoved outside of the hospitality system that is of immense social importance, basically depriving them of the protection of law.  Anything can be done to such a pariah, without any fear of repercussions.

The ostracised whom, given the often political dimension of their judgement could be quite influential people, banded together for survival, forming communities that were convenient scapegoats for unscrupulous politicians in difficult times.  With the rise of the Dynasts came increased tension between the habitable planets, and the Ostrakoï - at least, the best organised and better led among them - became useful.  To avoid these mercenaries being hired by individuals or groups outside of the system of power, the Dynasts developed a clever and highly codified system.  Instead of paying these mercenaries for their service, with drakma that anyone could get their hands on, they instead (or rather, as well) offered them kudos, which was contractualised, registered, specific to a given planet and even inheritable, and which, when the required amount was amassed, could be traded for citizenship, and thus an end to ostracism.  As they became more and more useful, the Ostraka negociated a way around the ridiculously high cost of said citizenship, by allowing individuals to pool their kudos, and offer it to the most meritorious among them, generally by vote; this had the consequence of tying less tightly a given group of Ostrakoï to a given Dynasty.  The same individuals pooled their resources too, and there are now certain Ostrakoï who number in the hundreds, boasting a small fleet of starships to their name.  Certain individuals who have acquired enough kudos to become citizens in their own right, continue nonetheless on their path, preferring glory and an everlasting name to a more comfortable existence.  A perfect example of them is the corsair Herakles, whose countless adventures have become popular fiction. 

The Ostrakoï also tend to attract to them other people whom, although not actually ostracised, have professions or situations that place them outside the ordinary structures of society, and whose association with the pariahs of society can offer both protection and opportunity.  Examples include wandering thespians or philosophers, young Spartans during their rite of passage, and the Furies, that peculiar type of bounty-hunters that charge themselves with avenging certain unpunished crimes.

 

Troy 

There is a sixth planet in the Olympos system that is fit for habitation, but it sits completely without the political and social system that is everywhere else prevalent.  The Trojans rejected mnemosynê from the outset, on moral grounds.  The other Hellenes considered that by doing so, they were condemning millions to an unnecessary death, which on moral grounds was unacceptable.  The very notion of immortality was the apple of discord that sparked off the Trojan War, which has continued on and off ever since.  When the other planets realised Troy was probably right all along, the resulting truce was quickly undermined by the future Dynasts, who saw in all the dismay a wonderful opportunity and Troy an obstacle to it.  When the dust had settled upon all that, Troy was looked upon by all the Dynasts as a permanent threat.  Did it not stand resolutely apart, organised along ancient lines, a dangerous reminder to all that the Dynasts were neither the first, nor the only means, by which humans could choose to be governed.

In consequence, Troy, behind its firewalls, has basically been under siege for decades, with no immediate hope of the stalemate being broken.  Unless of course the Divine decide to take a hand in it... 

 

The Elysian Fields 

A space station which a now long-gone benefactor dared to place into direct orbit around Olympos, and which somehow the Divine residing there never troubled to notice, the Elysian Fields take luxury to a level that truly cannot be described to anyone that has not experienced it.  They are very few : it is not a place that can be bought into, after all, money cannot buy happiness, right ?  Membership is restricted to family members of the Dynasties - and even then only upon cooptation - and to individuals whose exploits have brought them such immense amounts of kudos that they have been awarded the much coveted title of heros.   

Prometheus

When the Divine came to this corner of the galaxy, there was already one sentient race present, precisely in the Olympos System, whose grasp on the fundamentals of the universe was sufficient to have given them space travel, and a pretty solid understanding of how everything hung together, and indeed what the Divine actually were and how Chaos most likely functioned.  It is rumoured that these Titans did much to help seed the thirty-odd less one other systems with sentience, in accord with the wishes of the extraordinary beings that now resided among them.  They obtained, in return, a unique relationship with the Divine.

The story goes that as primitive civilisations began to spring up among the stars, the Titans brought some of their members to the Olympos System, to place them in benevolent environments, and study them in perfect anonymity, aiming to improve the lot of what they increasingly and inevitably saw as their creation.  This was in sharp contrast to the Divine of Olympos, who at best thought of this collection of creatures as a sort of zoo.

There came a time when the Divine of Olympos, following their own mysterious compulsions, decided that the time had come to manipulate their creatures to some ungodly end.  Well, not ungodly, obviously, given their nature.  The Titans protested, then got really uptight when they realised, belatedly, that the ethereal beings they had teamed up with did absolutely not consider themselves partners, equal or unequal, and were simply going to do as they pleased, when it pleased them.  

This was why one of the foremost amongst the Titans, named Prometheus, somewhat foolishly decided to act.  To the emerging Hellenes he gave knowledge that they should not have possessed.