The premise of Okanverse is that a motley bunch of transhuman spacers in the plausible midfuture (2300s-2500s) are abducted from our universe by a semi-accident. (It so happens that they're mostly furries, and mostly gazelle-folk on top of that, but nobody said it had to be a widely representative sample!) It turns out that, previously invisible to humans, a multiversal war has been brewing between great hyperadvanced societies, and the apocalyptic chaos that ensues leaves countless worlds uninhabitable on the level of fundamental physics...
but our spacers are lucky, finding themselves whisked to a relatively stable new universe, and even permissive to many kinds of previously unknown physics. By the current day, they've managed to expand into the multiverse themselves, creating a burgeoning society where differences in physics between universes are exploited for social benefit and economic gain.
Coming fresh from the political climate of an Earth ravaged by climate change, the ensuing worldwide crisis, and economic collapse - and a declining capitalist world order on its last legs - the spacers eventually revolt against their administrators, representatives of the corporations and national interests who had deigned to rescue what they could of the old system by exploiting the resources of the asteroid belt...
The next 2000 years after the Great Teleportation bear witness to their forays into new moral and economic systems to prevent a return to the conditions of the past, as they slowly expand into their adopted homeworld and its star system, Liruma, and begin to uncover the details of the multiverse looming beyond their senses. Despite being still limited to slow fusion drives and chemical thrusters, a lively international network of intellectual currents and trade develops throughout the era. Several broad political currents emerge, among them:
- the Socialists are the most successful at establishing a far-reaching political order in the new era, with hundreds of spacefaring nations coming to participate in the International Economic Commission. These polities range across a span of tendencies from multi-party democratic socialist states operating a nationalized industrial base to left libertarian syndicate-economies where the economy and market is managed by trade unions. The IEC's policies broadly aim to advance the notion that the worker is entitled to all they produce.
- farther to their left the Communists eventually establish the Federation, borne of compromise between their many respective tendencies, ranging from centralized states to libertarian communist sub-federations. Distinct from the Socialists, Federation politics take up the ethos of distribution according to need, with labor obligations chosen by ability - material resources are held in common with distribution and labor obligations managed by various kinds of elected economic planners or by individual standards of mutual aid. Prison abolition is a strong current here, and a number of smaller anarchist communist polities crop up among the many.
- disgruntled progressive members of the merchant classes under the old administrators ally with workers' factions, calling themselves anti-capitalist Free Traders: a market-libertarian tendency based on the premise that the profit motive and the free market are opposite principles. Subsequently, all profit incentives shall be tightly constrained, and monopolies strictly forbidden; and no one - especially the state - shall be authorized to force anyone else to carry out the terms of a deal, even enforcing the collection of debts.
- farther to the right, various strains of Separatist factions encourage the development of nationalist governments who control the industries via an economic bureaucracy for the "benefit of the national project".
The many great tendencies all agree on a few general principles. Slavery, of course, shall not be tolerated anywhere. (The abolition of more nuanced forms of bondage, like waged labor, are subject to greater contention.) Those that believe in the continuing usefulness of money in economics mostly agree to tight regulations on financial speculation and the maintenance of fiat currency, with all debts subject to perdiodic cancellation by the government or relevant economic regulatory body, especially when the interest surpasses the principal. Predatory lending is broadly outlawed, and conditions for the seizure of debtor property tightly controlled.
Late in the post-capitalist age, transhumanity happens upon a slate of mostly intact, derelict, alien spacecraft. Manufactured by Kardashevs (the general term for hyperadvanced societies far outstripping transhumans' capacity to harness physical power and computer processing power), their dismantling proves essential in unlocking torch-drive and FTL technologies far ahead of expectations.
This plays a part in ending the relative peace of the times - but it's really a brewing economic crisis that drives the rise of new exploitative economic reforms and fearsome regimes, which eventually culminate in the foundation of the Liruma Mandate. With the rise of the Mandate, a multiversal military alliance and controller of international trade that seeks to expand its reach across the many alien worlds in the hyperspace cluster called the Local Bulk, the cycle turns over into a new epoch of voracious empire...
One marked by the exploitation of different physics from universe to universe, for social benefit and economic gain; the gradual dismantling of economic protections for debtors that had been guaranteed for so long; a surge in new techniques of effectively forced labor, such as mind upload peonage. And also, technologically, by the advancement of neurotech - innovations related to mental modification, mind uploading, and AI - to a point where technologists anticipate the arrival of "full concept mapping", the ability of modern neurofirmware to parse memories and abstract links between pieces of mental data into a reliably navigable and strongly modifiable digital data structure. In other words, a world where one's mind can be precisely modified down to the level of detailed tailored memories, and the insertion of "skill modules" allowing one to quickly learn new things.
It's also characterized by great patterns of what might be called multiversalization, the sudden welding together of previously mutually unknown alien societies by the new imperial transport and communications infrastructure and the Mandate's broad ideology. Even the leftovers of the old multiversal apocalypse can be used to the benefit of empire: powerful, dangerous phenomena and artefacts are collected from across ravaged sectors of space, controlled, and harnessed; deals can be struck with the odd Kardashevs who make themselves known to transhuman society, who seem to bemusedly acknowledge the transhumans' ability to help them rebuild their old power, so greatly had they ravaged one another. And as alien labor forces and peripheral transhuman ones are integrated into the new world order, struggles erupt and revolutionary factions forge new alliances with the leftist powers of Transhuman Space. The Federation astromilitary fights an intense existential conflict with the Mandate, alongside the waning powers of the IEC and even, at times, the Free Traders. Then, during a bleak-looking Mandate-Federation crisis, a rebellion in the core of industrialized space gives rise to a new, burgeoning polity of anarchist communists - the Sasasi Autonomous Zone, with whom the Federation declares a tense yet close cooperation.
It's also during this time that the Alsifer system, with its dieselpunk space travel, is discovered and inducted by Federation / Zoner forces. Someone's been busy tossing transhumans around hyperspace, it would seem!
Okan is born in the Mandate in the fifth century of this new world. As she grows up in a broad society of transhuman immortals against the backdrop of widespread warfare and intrigue, she lands a job as a truck-freighter pilot hauling goods across hyperspace...
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