Crucible seeds are dropped from spaceships into the seething clouds of the abyss. Long curving ribbons curls out from them as they sink into the clouds.

Jellyfishlike blimps floating in the winds.

Crystalline pleasure palaces stretch out gracefully on long stalks, reaching into the clouds and swaying in the winds.

A man sweeps up his trenchcoat and launches himself into the air, his coat separating at the back and lengthening into a pair of long, flexible wings.

A team dressed in high tech Bedouin gear leaps from a high tech airship to another more jellyfish-like one, attaching a ring to the surface of the second floater, then climbing into a small pouch on top of the ring and finally dropping inside.

Greasy hackers in dingy surroundings massage and manipulate fluorescent floating shapes and structures, sorting through them. They do not disappear and reappear in the manner of holograms: instead they change shape and color as new parts are called up to work on.

A scientist dramatically says “ … And Print”, then hits an execute button. Across the room a monstrous, insectile machine that looks like a cross between an engineering plotter, a CNC machine tool, and one of the insectile typewriters from naked lunch springs to life, with beady rings sliding over mantislike arms that precisely and patiently extend here and then there, spitting out a steady stream of of globule-like particles.

Another lab: this one in the bright white sterile look of 2001 and 60’s sci-fi, with bulbous shapes and smooth lines overlooking huge portscreens with dramatic views of the pulsing clouds of the surface and off to the horizons of space, with the gleaming white lines of the station visible in the near ground. In the foreground lab coated scientists fuss over a gleaming high-tech loom which is spinning out a thick grey cloth. Other technicians run tests on samples, pressing buttons and observing as the cloth contorts in the grip of crystalline machines.

A transparent ribbed tube wavers in the wind as twin slidewalks ferry passengers each way. The tube connects a huge domed floater to a series of smaller ones. The whole scene is a cross between a busy airport and a fisherman’s wharf, with hardbitten pioneer types in trenchcoats mixing with wide eyed new arrivals.

This is Venus in the year 2141. This is your new home.

Venus has been the most visible feature in Earth’s night sky since the dawn of history and has thus spawned thousands of legends. Early astronomers who realized its nature as a separate planet rotating the sun imagined it as a sister to Earth.

It came as a disappointment when early studies and the first space missions like the Soviet Venera probes revealed that Venus was a singularly hostile environment, with enormous pressure, high temperatures, and a corrosive atmosphere. Those who dreamed of human settlement on other planets forgot Venus and concentrated on the more welcoming environment of Mars.

During the initial global warming years, massive space projects were unleashed and given almost unlimited funding thanks to fear of extinction of human life on Earth. The Mars settlement effort was meant to guarantee humanity’s survival, but most energy was focused on transforming Earth’s weather. Venus was of particular interest to terraforming scientists as it had undergone a catastrophic global warming process. Eros station was built as a floating scientific research outpost at this time.

Around this era Mars was receiving its first settlements as well. The challenges posed by settling Venus seemed too great at the time. However, as the first fusion drives were mass produced, the economy changed. Global warming and the related storms began to make processing seawater for deuterium unattractive. Deuterium is a necessary ingredient for all types of fusion. Venus is abundant in the isotope, and several processing facilities were developed on Venus.

Late in the period, the SkyWheel was developed in orbit around Venus, making shipping D2 out easier and greatly expanding Venus’ economy. Around that time, Eros Station grew to be a sex tourism destination for interplanetary travellers.

Just as Mars was becoming a populous colony and Earth was beginning to re-establish itself, the first ice winters hit Earth. All deuterium production facilities on Earth were destroyed. Venus became the system’s sole source of a crucial component of fusion. Billions of people on Earth became refugees, and the political pressure to open up settlement became unstoppable.

Since then millions of settlers have arrived on Venus, both the wealthy and the most powerless. As war drags out on Mars, Venus has become a sort of Casablanca, with all the trouble and intrigue that implies.

Venus is the point nearest to the sun with a variety of human and industrial facilities. Nearly all efficient transfers from one orbit to another within the solar system involve gravitational assists from the sun, and gravitational assists from Venus are also very attractive. This means that Venus became a transport hub in the early days of solar system settlement, and this arrangement has continued even though direct transfers have become more feasible due to improved fusion power.

There is a diverse array of systems deployed in front of and behind Venus on its orbit to assist gravitational catapult maneuvers. This area is collectively known as the trailer park. Venus and Earth’s orbit align to be at their minimum distance every five Venusian days, or about every four Earth years. The last time this happened, Venus was inundated with tourists and refugees.

There is a further collection of sites, installations, and materials at Venus’ L1 Lagrange point between the sun and Venus. This is the point where the gravity of the sun and Venus balance one another, meaning that it is the perfect place to put space equipment that you don’t want to periodically move around with rockets.

The L1 Lagrange points are also generally useful for another reason. There are special transfer paths between the planets that lead from one planet’s L1 to another that cost almost no energy. Drawn on a map, they would seem to be absolutely insane, spinning in loops, going the wrong way, and generally meandering like a drunken sailor.

However, these special transfers allow movement without significant cost in energy, allowing vast bulks of non-essential cargo to be sent very cheaply indeed, particularly from the asteroid belt and the Oort cloud to the inner solar system. All such pathways begin at one of the L1 points of major solar system bodies.

Finally, Venus’s L1 (VL1) has another reason to be important. It is the installation site for the massive solar parasols that provide light and day cycles for the major Venusian colonies.

Venus’ surface temperatures and pressures are inimical to all human activities.

At an altitude of about 50km above the surface, both the pressure and the temperature stabilize at near Earthlike values. With Venus’ gravity of 90% Earth’s, Venusians can live stably within special floating airships known as rafts.

Up to about 40 km over the surface, Venus is largely cloudless, with thick pressure and lower winds.

From there to about 65 km up there are three cloud layers, known as Lower Cloud, Middle Cloud, and Upper Cloud. They are separated by thin cloudless layers. The different clouds are caught within wind streams of varying speeds. Venus’s local weather is extremely chaotic, especially in the temperate latitudes.

The narrow band of temperature and pressure that humans can live in lies entirely within Upper Cloud. Highside, Midsky, and Lowride refer to the top, center, and bottom of Upper Cloud respectively.

The cloud layers are made mostly of droplets of sulphuric acid and particles of volcanic dust.

Venus’s surface is composed of basaltic silicate rock similar to volcanic rock on Earth. Venus is volcanically active, and there are several well-defined highland regions. Dredging for minable materials occurs on a regular basis. Volcanic dust is also widely used as a construction material, offering silicon, sulphur, iron, magnesium and other metals.

Venus, like Mars, has no magnetosphere. This means that compasses do not work there, and that there is no massive magnetic field to deflect highly charged solar particles. On Mars this is a minor problem, but in the context of an established colony, acceptable. On Venus this is dangerous, since Venus is much closer to the sun and thus receives about twice as much radiation. Unshielded, it would make cancer a near-certainty over less than a decade.

There is a reasonable answer to the problem. Venus’s thick atmosphere absorbs solar radiation nicely, especially the dust particles of the cloud layers. However, in itself this presents several problems. The first is that it requires living in a perpetual twilight haze. Even with the parasols at L1 regulating light cycles, in the lower clouds the haze itself carries light. Psychologically, life on Venus can trigger pathological claustrophobia. Probably the best preventative measure is simply to live near the cloud tops. However, the settlements that do this, such as Eros, require significant radiation shielding.

Venus’ climate is dominated by powerful winds that circle the planet every 4 Earth days, whipping over the surface at 300 km/hr from East to west.

At the poles these spiralling winds form huge hurricanes that reach down through the cloud layers into the lower atmosphere. Surrounding these polar storms are the ring mounts, large rises of cooler and higher air which can also be dangerous to inhabited rafts. Ships and habitats which enter these regions can exploded as they loft to areas of lower pressure and temperature.

The other cloud layers are marked by sudden updrafts and downdrafts and local turbulence. Static electricity and thunderstorms are extremely common – many rafts rely on thunderstorms to provide energy to process carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen.

During the day on Highside, sunlight intensity is about twice Earth’s. This is widely used for solar power collection. Near the bottom of the cloud layers, it’s as bright as a typical day on Earth. Tethered stations also use temperature differentials from further down the cable to generate aerothermal power.

Venus has very little tilt in its axis of rotation, meaning that there are no seasons on the planet.

Venus has the thickest atmosphere of any of the solar system’s non gas giant planets. At the surface it reaches extremes of 800 times Earth sea level pressures. A huge percentage of the atmosphere is in the form of carbon dioxide, which drives Venus’ unique climate. Nitrogen and argon are also abundant. Various hydrogen sulfide gases are also present.

The thick clouds composed of hydrogen sulfide hold most of the planet’s hydrogen. Of that, 5% is in the form of deuterium, which is a crucial fuel for the fusion economy. Venus’s heat and high atmosphere have boiled away much of the light hydrogen, leaving behind heavy deuterium. Notable by their near absence are gaseous water and O2.

Venus has constant torrential winds, driven by the fierce heat and slow rotation of the planet. They whip around the equator travelling over the surface at around 300 km/hr. This is fast enough to circumnavigate the planet in about three earth days. These winds generally drift from the equator towards the poles. This forms recurring ‘Y’ and ‘V’ patterns in the cloud tops. Venus also has a variety of local winds that diverge from this overall pattern. They rapidly descend, rise, form cross currents, and even form local vortexes. As a sailor, they are dangerous and unpredictable, but also necessary. The prevailing winds are the water in a sailor’s idiom: the cross winds are the gusts that make movement and navigation possible.

Venus is surrounded by boiling clouds of concentrated sulphuric acid. Suspended in the clouds are tiny particles of sulphur compounds generated by Venus’s active volcanoes.

Venus’s clouds rise very high into the atmosphere, as much as 70 km above Venus. They diverge into three separate layers of cloud: imaginatively named Upper Cloud, Middle Cloud, and Lower Cloud. Each layer is about 10 km thick. The lower levels of Venus’s atmosphere are cloudless as the intense heat and pressure make vapor formation impossible.

Venus’s Upper Cloud is the area where temperatures and pressures achieve nearly Earth like values. As such is it the site of nearly all human activity on the planet. Upper Cloud stretches from about 50-60 km above the Venusian surface.

On the surface, temperatures range from 500 to 800 degrees centigrade. This is hot enough to melt lead and will very quickly destroy electronic or biological components. Some manmade materials can survive this environment, like graphite, but designs to operate in this here are complicated by the need to vent heat from the refrigeration systems – which must be much hotter than the surrounding environment to be able to do their job.

In Upper Cloud, where human activity is centered, temperatures range from 40 to 10 degrees Celsius. The variations are intense not only by altitude (lower regions are much hotter), but also due to the unpredictable up swellings of hot air from lower cloud levels. These are stronger and steadier in the equatorial regions and less common but more unpredictable in the temperate latitudes.

In Upper Cloud pressures range from about half an atmosphere to two Earth atmospheres. Rafts typically have various systems that help regulate these pressures, but air pressure is an issue for all Venusians. Some people manage to live regularly at two atmospheres with a minimum of difficulty in some of the lowlife hives.

Like Earth, the equatorial regions receive more sunlight than the Polar Regions. Although most of Venus’s heat comes from the greenhouse effect, the solar energy still has an effect on the temperature of the planet, causing the thick atmosphere and all three cloud layers to rise at the equator. These cloud layers then swirl to the south and north until they reach the poles, where they lose energy and begin to spin back towards the surface.

A similar system exists on Earth, but where Earth’s is gentle and is regulated by the biosphere, dead Venus lies in its grip. This Hadley cell has spawned two enormous, gigantic tornadoes that suck gas, clouds and hives alike down into the hellish depths of the lower atmosphere.

The dynamics of these permanent storms are unpredictable and violent. At times they may spawn dual eyes as they funnel colder gas back to lower levels of the atmosphere. Any and all Venusians regard a trip to the Polar Regions as something to be feared.

As previously mentioned the extremes of heat at the surface can melt lead and will degrade nearly any man-made material.

The average surface pressure on Venus is about 90 bars, which is to say 90 times Earth’s air pressure at sea level. This is equivalent to the pressures in the deepest depths of Earth’s ocean.

The pressure at the surface creates a severe strain on any system that tries to maintain Earth sea level pressures for human inhabitation. This, combined with the temperatures and the corrosive chemical environment, makes developing systems designed for human inhabitation of the surface of Venus nearly impossible. Proposed systems exist mainly as answers to engineering challenges than to fulfill a real need.

Automated systems do exist and are commonly used for mineral prospecting and dredging, but are designed to be disposable, with expected MTBF topping out at a few weeks.

Venus’s rocks are similar to Earth’s. However all liquid water and hydrogen in all forms have largely been burnt off into space. Some elements crucial to life cannot really be found in the atmosphere and must be mined from the surface on the planet using remote machinery. Phosphorus and Potassium are good examples. Large amounts of water and silicates are imported from the belt and sold as minerals.

Venus has active volcanoes which periodically erupt and cover the whole surface with lava. There are smaller active volcanoes which largely spew ash into the atmosphere. This ash is the main source of minerals for industry and the biosphere.

Venus has now developed a human-designed ecology of specialized symbiotic organisms built to reproduce in Venus’s harsh environment. These organisms, known collectively as rafts, display a wide variety of metabolic systems that absorb and process materials from the Venusian environment into useful forms at all levels. All of these organisms float far above the surface of the planet, but many of them exist at pressures and temperatures much higher than could be survived by humans.

It’s difficult to make generalizations about the nature of Venusian life as experimental modifications are constantly being invented and freely released to spread through the existing ‘genetic pool’ of rafts. However most rafts have a thick skin made from porous graphene fabric that holds a bubble of buoyant processed atmosphere, allowing the entire raft to float in the sky like a balloon. The pores in the fabric separate the constituents of the Venusian atmosphere with mechanical chemistry techniques.

The main constituent of the atmosphere, CO2, is channelled to the cracker, the fundamental unit of Venusian biochemistry, which uses static charge collected from the atmosphere to catalyze CO2 into oxygen and carbon, using the carbon to create and expand the graphene envelope and releasing the oxygen into the bubble as a breathable gas and combining it with hydrogen from the sulphuric acid to create water.

Inside the envelope, metabolism varies widely, but generally there are one or several wombs which carry an ark of cell samples to populate the interior environment of the womb. These host organisms will each absorb some of the other resources from the atmosphere, such as sulphuric acid, and process it to make needed resources such as water and sulphur compounds. Others will store static electricity, and create breathable atmosphere.

Individual rafts form clusters called hives, both naturally and with human assistance. Hives share resources between individual rafts, forming larger symbiotic organisms with specialized production units. Individual rafts act as cells of the larger organism.

The larger rafts are carefully tended to support human life within the outer shells. Water, sugar, protein, and breathable air are all needed and their concentrations must be kept stable. In addition, extremes of pressure and temperature must be carefully avoided. A wide variety of biological sytems work together to make human life inside a raft liveable, if not exactly comfortable.

Venus’s biosphere is a complex thing – at the planetary level it is dominated by the rafts described above, but within the rafts humans interact with a wide variety of lifeforms.

Most of the habitable space inside a non-farmed raft is covered by a dense matted web of spider web-like strands of graphene coated in algae and lichens. This sticky, wet material collects and processes raw water and converts a raw nitrogen oxygen carbon dioxide atmosphere into sugars and soil. To use an earth analogy this is the forest canopy of the rainforest, doing the majority of photosynthetic work.

Below, a variety of insects and bats thrive. Insects in particular are used by the biological computers that regulate the various lifeforms inside a raft biosphere to do construction work such as weaving the graphene tubules that carry water and nutrients to the algae at the top of the dome. Various fungi and bacteria work to build a stable, weighted base of tough soil to help provide a stable orientation. As secession completes and the raft grows to a larger size, climbing vines and small plants begin to take over the under story from slime and moulds. Green plant life begins to create an atmosphere that is not only breathable but also pleasant. Late stage rafts also typically have advanced bee colonies which create a specialized variety of honey called eco. This substance is the essential barter currency of Venus.

Venus is ruled as direct protectorate of the UN. Effective administration during the war is done by EarthForce. Rationing and production quotas are theoretically in place, although enforcement is lax.

However, each hive is administered as a sovereign territory. Although EarthForce agents generally have jurisdiction regarding all ‘international’ crimes and will make arrests as they see fit, all local laws are handled by the local sovereign authority.

This means that local criminal and civil laws vary wildly between different locations. Some are governed by corporate bodies, other democratically, others by landholding and so on.

Although all hives must extend diplomatic protection to EarthForce delegates and military personnel, legal protection for official delegates from other hives is spotty and depends on arrangements made by the hives themselves. Powerful hives can usually back up the immunity of their local reps but smaller hives may not even claim any such immunity.

EarthForce claims jurisdiction over kidnappings, political crimes, sedition, trade offences, environmental crimes, fraud, and violations of diplomatic protocols. In any criminal case where there is a question of jurisdiction EarthForce has priority over local law enforcement – a fact that has caused a number of scandals and incidents, as they frequently use this authority to protect favoured or useful individuals from local prosecution.

Venus is largely non-democratic, but there are several political movements, notably the Watchers of the Light religious movement which seeks political control as well as spiritual ends, and the NeoComs who seek a communist revolution. Although violent struggle is rare, police action is not unknown.

NeoComs are particularly widespread, and while they visually resemble old line communists with their Mao hats and Lenin beards, their ideology is quite different. They do not reject private property and companies so much as they reject ownership of ideas. Such beliefs have made them the premiere data pirates, and in a place like Venus where the conceptual can easily be made physical, they preach an end to all scarcity. Bitterly resisted by IP corporations, they are nonetheless at the centre of a thriving industry of open source design that has made many millionaires.

Although NeoComs ideology does not explicitly reject violence in the service of a good cause, most sympathisers are not really interested in armed conflict, expecting that the wide spread of open source biological objects and the self-reproducing machines to make them with will cause a non-violent social revolution from below.

Another ideological movement of note is the Evolutionary social movement and its terrorist counterpart known as Evolve!

Evolutionaries believe that instead of terraforming Venus (or Mars, or Earth) to suit humanity, it is better to personaform humanity to suit the environment it lives in. Many Venusians are low level sympathizers with the evolutionary movement, often in combination with Venus nativist beliefs, since in the long term the absorption of so many refugees implies the terraformation of Venus.

The group known as Evolve! takes this a step further, designing genetic alterations that act like communicable diseases, causing their targets to grow wings, become pressure and corrosion tolerant, or simply visibly mutate. Evolve! is not a centrally controlled organization, but rather a collection of likeminded individuals that never communicates in any manner other than through the results of their work. Some groups take a more poetic terrorist approach, creating targeted viruses meant to attack certain people or social groups in a dramatically ironic way. One such attack turned rats into miniature farm animals, while yet another transformed the inhabitants of an EarthForce outpost into pigs.

Venus’s population has increased more than ten-fold over the last three years to almost 500 million people.

These people are disproportionately from extreme Northern and Southern climes on Earth. Russia, Canada, and Nigeria are notably represented. Many people from southern latitudes were forced to relocate to Venus as their old homes in once hot regions of Earth become temperate again due to the new Ice Age.

Eros is the largest city, with a population of approximately 100 million people.

Venus’ economy is largely based on deuterium extraction, low-cost manufacturing, and biological design.

Deuterium extraction involves the placement of tethered traps of varying designs which collect and partially refine deuterium from the sulphuric acid clouds of Venus. Venus is rich in deuterium because the thick and high atmosphere allows normal hydrogen to boil off into space leaving as much as 40% of the heavier isotope which is so crucial to fusion. Further refinement of the deuterium is carried out in large facilities floating over Venus where it is purified and compressed into liquid form. The waste hydrogen is also extremely valuable on Venus as it allows the direct manufacture of water with plentiful supplies of oxygen from CO2 cracking.

Venus has pioneered new methods of biological manufacturing which are proving useful for low cost interplanetary ship construction, personal armour, and other materials. This is a major facet of EarthForce‘s interest in Venus – it is a crucial production centre for the war effort. No other manufacturing area in the solar system can match Venus’s volume of production.

Venus is the centre of biological and smart cloth design. This is of use for personal armour, apps, and similar material. Mars is a huge market for such designs, as there is a strong need for tough, useful suits on the hazardous environment of the surface, particularly as the ground war begins.

Venus is currently undergoing a real-estate boom as the massive influx of refugees combines with new construction methods that allow for the efficient use of mass labour. A massive speculation bubble has pushed prices sky high and fuelled new construction. This has also created a ready market for refugee labour which has helped make the recent huge waves of immigration sustainable.

All refugee rafts exist in a state of profound deprivation, where even the most basic amenities are unavailable. Typical refugee exist in a lifestyle similar to the most abject subsistence societies on Earth, although a few have managed to take advantage of luck and relative freedom to create comfortable existences. In all cases, however, most refugees have neither trade goods nor anything of value whatsoever except the homes they have created. Such homes are of course owned by land speculators who have sponsored the care of the refugees in the hope that they will build just such attractive real estate.

Venus’s main currency is the eco – a 10 litre jug of specially tuned raft honey that contains a balanced supply of trace elements, sugar and water – the essential shock therapy to revive a damaged ecosystem. Each eco has a rough value equivalent to a week’s unskilled labour and is enough to support human life for about 20 days. Electronic equivalents to ecos are commonly traded, but unlike paper based currencies ecos must be backed by existing stores of actual fluid. Interest based money inflation is limited to UN currency, which is widely used by corporations but not for smaller scale trading.

Venus is largely settled by those who were worst hit by the cycles of global warming and freezing. Canadians, Russians, and Nigerians are particularly prominent, but there are people from all locations on Earth.

Canadians represent about 12% of Venus’s officially recognized population. Canadians dominate Athabaska hive, the centre of the deuterium extraction industry. Canadians represent a sort of false nation since so many of them are second generation immigrants and retain their original ethnic identity, but they do tend to live and work together in small trapping ships and subscribe to the ethos of multiculturalism and polite non-interference in the business of others.

Russians represent perhaps 11% of the population, but estimates are spotty since Russian crime syndicates control the illegal immigration industry. Russians dominate Venerogrod (Venus City), the centre of the heavy lifting industries. Russians also are renowned for large scale engineering expertise. Many of the large scale industrial projects on Venus such as the SkyWheel and Eros City’s cabling system are designed and maintained by Russian engineers.

Nigerians and other West Africans compose about 10% of the population of Venus. The vast majority of them live in Logos, Venus second largest city and the market maker for ecos, Venus’ currency. Nigerians control banking on Venus and are often found as small traders and real estate speculators and developers.

Most education on Venus is informal, done either via apprenticeship or BLU computer training. Informal academies of genetic designers are common throughout Venus, working as small teams apprenticed to master designers on research and craft oriented projects. Such organizations are similar in some ways to grad students working as assistants to a professor, but efficiency improvements are every bit as respected as original research and the work being done is nearly always direct and practical in nature.

Children are typically kept together and taken care of in nurseries until they are old enough to use BLU educational software, at which time they are usually either kept in for-profit day care centres or apprenticed to older professionals. The Watchers of the Light religious movement maintains its own traditional schools, but they also use BLU training and apprenticeship systems for young children.

The University of Venus is a major landholder on Eros City and is a system leader in biological manufacturing and design. The Journals and awards that drive the informal academy system’s relative prestige are controlled by the university faculty.

All of this is similar to systems on Earth and Mars that have evolved since the dislocations of the original global warming crises. What distinguishes Venus is the vast numbers of new arrivals in desperate need of retraining. Even moderately experienced genetic engineers, farmers and construction workers have found themselves leading armies of apprentices through basic assignments and tasks designed to develop a practical understanding of the field. This mentoring is supplemented by knowledge and guidance provided by BLU software.

Venus is notable for the diversity and variety of its sculpture, particularly in its clothing and architecture.

Various traditional forms of architecture that were abandoned in modern times due to the painstaking labour required have revived given the advent of efficient molecular manufacturing and the use of insects for constructions. Chinese and other Asian communities all over Venus have pioneered the widespread return of bas relief in houses, public buildings and many other places. Many developed areas in Venus cities are strikingly beautiful.

A new artistic movement called ‘airos’ has emerged on Venus, emphasizing curved lines, terraced overhangs, biomimicry, and a sensuous, organic feel. It is considered quite fashionable in other prosperous youth cultures in the solar system. Unfortunately, given the circumstances, that limits it largely to Belters and inhabitants of the larger moons of the outer solar system. Venus has also developed a vibrant youth culture and fashion style, which manifests in bone music, voluntary cosmetic augmentation, posthuman styles, and new forms of clothing that radically alter the appearance of their wearers. New youth culture in Eros City often rejects airos style and assumes a spikier, harder edged aesthetic.

Venus’s society is so young that generalizations are impossible, but some trends are taking shape in certain cities.

There is constant awareness of the fragility of life and the local ecosystems. Ecosystem collapse was generally responsible for their refugee trip to Venus, and has caused the deaths of several thriving cities on Venus. Extreme overpopulation has caused ever greater danger even as a better understanding of the risks involved has been reached. Most experts agree that another massive collapse is likely to happen soon – the only question is where.

A general lack of reliable law enforcement has resulted in a widespread acceptance of mob justice. Simmering factional disputes often erupt into mob warfare and such incidents are often accepted by EarthForce as a way for people to let off steam that might otherwise be directed at them. Neighbourhood associations and ethnic syndicates are accepted as a necessity by virtually all people living on Venus.

Constant crowding has resulted in reduction in personal space and a growing acceptance of casual contact with strangers. Demanding a meter of personal space on Venus often means that some poor soul in the back is being crushed.

Mood whiteners are aerosol anti-depressants which help to combat the tension provoking effects of heat and overcrowding. They are in general use in common areas in all large cities and everywhere in many hives. Again, most people accept this as a necessity given the real dangers of internecine warfare.

Posthumans are the nucleus of several large and growing factions that assert that traditional human life has no place on Venus and that the species must adapt to survive. Some believers have seen fit to release viruses that genetically reprogram the infected, leaving them with permanent modifications to their bodies, which vary between life-threatening and useful. The overcrowding and often unhealthy aspects of life on Venus make disease a constant threat.

Religion on Venus is dominated by the Watchers of the Light Christian fundamentalist sect. Although many members of other Christian denominations would dispute the Christianity of the Watchers, given the semi-divine status they ascribe to Waylon Greene, it’s unquestionable that their fundamental narrative comes from evangelical doctrine.

The Watchers essentially believe that Venus is a literal hell, with the actual souls of the damned being reincarnated on Venus’s surface daily to die in agony in the heat and sulphuric acid. Satan himself walks the surface, and any day he will rise to the colonies above to father an Antichrist from among the sinners who live there. Very soon, the battle for humanity will begin, and will last for a very long time and spread throughout the solar system, holding humanity in the balance. Eventually the followers of Waylon Greene will triumph in their long struggle against the minions of evil, destroy the army of the damned, and reclaim Venus itself from Satan and rebuild Venus’s surface into their promised land. Greene claimed to have had his visitation from Jesus and Satan after viewing a diagram of Venus’ pentagram shaped orbital precession.

As a religious denomination, the Watchers favour self-sufficiency and developing their own communities separate from the sinners that dominate Venus, although they have strong missionary operations in refugee camps. The Watchers maintain several large hives which resemble armed camps, and dominate a significant number of smaller hives.

There is a schismatic group within the sect that attempts to merge the thinking of the ‘religions of the book’: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. They are known as the Abrahamians, and dominate the Mound. They are if anything more millenarian that the main line of the church and completely reject any technology that affects the mind such as BLUs.

Other sects and religions also operate on Venus, but in terms of organized fundamentalism, the Watchers dominate the imagination of nearly everyone when religion on Venus is discussed. Small sects centred on charismatic personalities are constantly popping up on isolated refugee hives. The Watchers have special missionaries who are focused on bringing such leaders into the fold, as their doctrine suggests that a large number of children of Jesus will be born in the times before the battle and will reach awareness once they reach Venus.

One other well known sect is the Bringers of Truth, an odd cult that believes that humanity must realize its divine potential to prevail in the coming struggle against demons from outer space. To this end, the Bringers seek to mutate humanity to said potential by infecting themselves with pathogenic apps and sleeping with any and all comers. Headquartered in the Belt, their members travel everywhere but are especially common on Venus as their ideology has echoes in the Evolutionary political/terrorist movement.