I already told you about Floaterverse, where just about everyone on Earth
lives on artificial floating islands. Isoverse is similar to that, but taken
to an extreme extreme. I didn’t repeat myself, the first extreme is an
adjective, and the second a noun. The Floaters still maintain their
communities, they’re just modular. They can shift them around, which serves
to promote a global community. The Isoversals, on the other hand, stay
almost completely separate from each other, and they do it in space.
Civilization started out normal, but quickly diverged, both socially, and
scientifically. Advancement became an obsession for these people, and
contrary to popular belief, this is not normal. For centuries, most versions
of Earth will develop technology quite slowly, necessity being the mother of
invention, and all. Most will not form a drive to push forward regardless of
true need until much later. Coupled with religious hangups, this can hold
progress back rather well. These same obstacles happened to the Isoversals
as well, but unlike others, it severely pissed them off. A resistance group
of sorts rose to power, and banned all religion impressively early. I say
impressive, but do not mistake that to mean I condone their violent
behavior. It’s just such an unusual thing to happen in history, but all
told, there was less violence here than in most other universes. The group
also banned war, and were prepared to stoop to the level of irony in order
to protect that mandate. This also had the effect of increasing the global
population, which might sound like a good thing, but it came with some
problems. It came with disease. It was worse than any pandemic on any other
world, except for the sterility virus. The Isoversals were nearly wiped out
by it, and it forced them to change their perspective.
The survivors continued to advance, and came up with ways to protect
themselves against something like this happening again. Self-quarantining
became the norm, and each passing generation was more and more used to the
idea, until no one was left alive who felt that there was any better way to
live. To maintain the species, they had to live separately. It was the only
way, according to researchers. Innovation didn’t halt, though, of course,
and soon they were reapplying their methods to space travel. This reached
its inevitable state when every family was afforded its own fusion-powered
spacecraft habitat that could orbit a planet, or a host star. If requested
and approved, they could even be fitted with a propulsion system capable of
delivering them to other star systems. When a child was old enough to go off
on their own, they did so literally, by transferring to a unit only large
enough to accommodate them. Obviously, the entire point of all this was to
protect the species, but the price of not going extinct by some disease
could not be going extinct by a lack of propagation. Instead of interacting
in base reality, communities formed in virtual constructs. They kept their
physical bodies, but spent most of their time connected to the network. When
two people met, they would begin by dating each other remotely, and would
even form a permanent union in VR. They would only come together outside of
VR to start a family, and they were assigned a larger habitat in order to
make that work. This was how they lived, and they never thought there could
be a better way. They didn’t colonize space to protect the environment of
their home planet. They did it because they believed it was the best way to
insulate themselves from each other. But it protected them from the Ochivari
just the same.
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