Neo-Venus

Neo-Venus (working title) is a hard-ish science fiction setting, seasoned heavily with the flavors of fantasy. It takes place thousands of years in the future high in the skies of a partially terraformed Venus after the collapse of the technological civilization that conducted the terraforming. The focus is on the various peoples who survived that collapse and still call this world home, the ways in which it has changed them, and the ways in which they are very much the same as people today.   An interesting quirk of Venus, even at present, is that it is actually home to one of the most Earthlike environments in our Solar System. While the surface is rightly notorious for its inhospitable heat and pressure, 50km up the story is quite different. The temperature and pressure there are quite close to Earth sea level: Earth atmosphere would actually act as a lifting gas on Venus. This raises the intriguing possibility of building floating cities in the clouds, held aloft by the very atmosphere their inhabitants breathe.   In the setting of Neo-Venus, humanity did just that as they spread throughout the Solar System. Then they took it one step further by engineering life that could survive outside the cities, using some planetary engineering techniques to meet that life halfway with more hospitable conditions (increased water and molecular oxygen, reduced sulfuric acid, an artificial magnetosphere, and so on). The first clouds of aeroplankton were successful, and served as a foundation for an increasingly complex ecosystem that culminated in the creation of great filter-feeding skywhales and immense forests of entangled balloon trees. Some of the scientists on the project even took the final leap of altering their own bodies and genetics, gaining wings and a respiratory system better able to cope with the not-quite-Earthlike atmosphere. These "Nomads" had chosen to "go native" on Venus, adopting a sort of hunter-gatherer lifestyle amidst the glorious ecosystem they had worked so long to bring about. A few went even farther, and no longer even resemble the bipedal primates that departed from Earth. Some of the near-baseline humans in the cities thought this all a bit extreme and even macabre, but in general both Nomads and city-dwellers agreed that the other's business was none of theirs. So for a time, there was peace and prosperity in the skies of Venus.   Then came the Fall, not just to Venus but to the Solar System as a whole, and possibly beyond. Details on its cause and exact nature have been lost to the hazy depths of time, but this much is known: the great cities that the Ancients spun from clouds were destroyed in a single turning of the sky. Countless millions perished there, to say nothing of the billions who dwelt offworld and whose fate was implied (and forgotten) through their sudden silence. But whatever caused the disaster did not touch the orbiting Sentinels generating the magnetosphere, or the great Fountains that circulated trace elements up from the surface. Nor did it directly harm the Nomads or the small fleets of shuttlecraft that escaped from the cities carrying a few survivors, though choking dust clouds and the strange illnesses they brought took their own tolls.   Gradually, the turmoil of the Fall faded. The Nomads continued much as they had before, traveling as they willed among the open skies. The city-dwellers faced a harder struggle, their bodies ill-equipped for the environment and their only means of flight being the rapidly malfunctioning shuttles. But they found lasting refuge among the floating forests, where the climate was friendlier and solid ground was at least present even if unstable. Though they gradually lost their advanced technology (metal in particular being almost unobtainable), these Jungle-Dwellers managed to survive and even thrive by cultivating their forest homes as gardens.   Generations have passed, and much that was history has now faded into legend and myth. The relics of the Ancients are scarce and revered as magic, particularly the symbiotic nanotechnology known as Neuma. And as the Nomads and Jungle-Dwellers have developed, tensions have started to emerge. The Jungle-Dwellers have recently domesticated flying beasts of burden, enabling them to once again travel between the forest tangles. And many of the Nomads, once ambivalent or pitiable towards the wingless Jungle-Dwellers, have watched their subsequent expansion with great alarm. The stage is set for conflict, between these two descendants of humanity, and among them.   The great equalizer is the Neuma, usable by whoever can possess it. Whoever controls the Neuma will control the future. But that future may have more in store than either Nomad or Jungle-Dweller can foresee...