Hyperborea
Hyperborea is the northernmost permanent settlement on Mars, lying nearly at the northern pole. Hyperborea is a terraforming station first and foremost, but has evolved into a research collective directed towards biological and geological sciences as a whole, at least on the surface.
Demographics
The vast majority of Hyperborean residents are menial laborers or other low-level workers who manage the installation's terraforming systems, coordinate with other installations on the planet, or support the habitat in general. While Hyperborean workers enjoy a strong support network from habitat management, ensuring a life lived within the habitat is lived without significant want, little in the way of upward movement is possible for those outside the collective. As a result, those attracted to Hyperborea are typically of the same stock as those attracted to mines and labor of old; the terraforming plant offers financial opportunity and security, not high hopes to own the place.
Despite their disproportionate influence on the habitat and the planet at large, the actual research collective numbers in the low hundreds. However, these "great minds of the Union" are wired to the gills with all varieties of cognitive enhancements, life support systems, and other enhancements pushing the definition of "human".
Hyperborea itself stands in a curious place in relation to the Solar Union. A large minority of the research collective opposes the Union's militaristic bent and President Fuentes' rule. Hyperborea, however, is intrinsically bound to the Martian government headquartered in Olympia, and active resistance is necessarily impossible. Instead, the larger Brinker factions find themselves the occasional beneficiaries of unmarked courier ships bearing anonymized data and research- a quiet resistance with long-reaching implications. Their tensions with those favoring the Union have resulted in an internal cold war of sorts within the collective.
Geography
As a whole, Hyperborea is one of the coldest sites on Mars, often breaking -100 C during the winter. Hyperborea is one of the few places on Mars with liquid water, but it is only unfrozen by vast arrays of heating elements and pipelines rather than the local temperatures. In the open air, even carbon dioxide freezes. The summer forgoes the piercing cold in favor of extreme winds and dust storms, presenting another set of threats entirely. Hyperborean life, as a result, is restricted to its seven main domes and their secondary structures, and the surface poses a danger even for vacuum-suited individuals.
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