The ex-posthumans of the Jupiter system solved their problem in two ways. The first became the engels, emulating a higher godmind piece by piece. The second group chose to sever any possibility of regaining their posthuman selves, and instead became a race of “merely” advanced transhumans. Driven out by their engel kin for what they and their godminds saw as the ultimate sin, they were forced to move to the Saturn system.
Jupiter and its attendant moons have long been a staging area for both research and further colonisation. Never quite as populous as the inner worlds, they became a haven for those who desired privacy and sought to take personal modification to new levels. By the years just before the Fall, this had coalesced into a loose alliance based on the four Galilean moons and several orbital stations. Posthuman entities, their minds grander than almost anything else that human history had seen, spread out through advanced infrastructure built and designed by them to hold their expansive consciousness. Each still had a physical body, either a carefully crafted clone or their much altered original, but they functioned as nodes in something greater. The body was built to be an interchange, to house a density of processing ability in order to give the posthuman supermind a firm connection to base reality. They were tall, slender, beautiful, and filled with more technology than even their contemporaries in-system could imagine.
Some Gates do not lead to new lands under strange skies. They lead to massive underground warrens, halls and vaults carved by pick and claw. Some are hewn from ice, others from rock that could be found anywhere, and some from metal alone. While it is common knowledge that these places are deep underground, the truth is that most of them reside in hollowed-out asteroids.
Mars was always the planet closest to Terra, the best candidate for terraforming. Its history is in many ways longer than Terra’s, with relics and ruins from before the Fall still being easily searchable. The Fall scoured Terra, left very little remaining, but on dry cold Mars, history endures.
Mars always was, and always shall be a desert world, but liquid water returned to its surface millennia ago. The desert flows through a dozen shades of xerosere, from dense scrubland and wiry bush, to dry savanna and dusty plains. Still a severe world, Mars has relatively limited large wildlife, and what there is tends to be mammalian or avian. The cold climate is a barrier for many exotherms, granting their warm-blooded competitors a significant advantage.
