Sanseong space station
Sanseong translates as mountain fortress. Korea was known as a nation of fortresses.
Demographics
The concubines were descended from a multicultural population. (In many cases they are clones of celebrities. A sizable library of purloined genetic material was kept on hand for this purpose. The station leadership have often paid large sums of money for discarded hairs obtained from a hotel room by unscrupulous individuals.)
The non-concubine population is entirely descended from North Koreans or very occasionally from the offspring of North Koreans and a concubine.
Government
The situation on the space station quickly devolved into a horror show. The leadership quickly became a nest of vipers as it became clear that there would be very few positions of real power in the station. The former head of state was quickly murdered.
The society which evolved on the station had one emperor at the center of power.
Under the emperor were three rival lords of engineering, each of whom was responsible for maintaining one third of the space station. Each third of the station was fully redundant from the other two.
Each of the three lords have their masters of computers, plumbing, structure, life support, and electric power.
A fourth lord is in charge of the fusion reactor/engine. He has his own masters in various fields.
There are three lords of biotech. They each occupy their own mobile labs which move between the three space station segments. Each lord of biotech has masters to oversee individual projects.
There are three military officers, each of whom commands a small force of soldiers. They are directly under the command of the emperor. Nobody else is allowed to even touch a weapon. Even looking at a weapon is risky.
All of the masters have staff to do the actual work.
The emperor, lords, and masters all have servants and concubines (the number and quality depending on hierarchy). Staff do not.
Occasionally a lord or master displeases his superior and is demoted or executed. His replacement is usually selected from his immediate juniors.
Almost most of the masters, and all but one of the lords are male.
The staff and soldiers are all fairly young. They either get promoted or are killed before they get old. They have been indoctrinated their whole lives, and have no access to outside information. As such their understanding of the universe outside the station is very sketchy. They have all undergone biotech procedures to enhance their docility and loyalty. In addition, they are all implanted with execution devices which will kill them unless the devices receive an encrypted signal from devices implanted in the emperor. If the emperor dies, the device will not send out its code. The code is an asymmetrical encryption of the date and time, using the emperor's private key. The execution devices are able to decrypt the code, revealing the correct date and time. This prevents replay attacks and other tricks to fool the execution devices.
Defences
The station has externally mounted miniguns which are aimed by remote control. The multiple barrels of the miniguns increase the number of bullets which can be fired before the barrels overheat (since air cooling is not possible). The mounts have stops welded on them to make them incapable of aiming at any part of the station.
Soldiers wear armor, have armored gloves with built-in brass knuckles, and carry shock clubs. In the event of an emergency, they can be issued a variety of additional weaponry including hand guns which shoot frangible rounds and flash bang grenades. The focus on non-lethal weaponry has more to do with wanting to avoid damage to the station systems, and take interrogable prisoners, than it does to humanitarian impulses.
In the even of a serious revolt, the emperor can simply seal off the affected compartments and vent the air to space. In the event of an invasion, the miniguns will fire volleys of armor piercing, tungsten rounds at any incoming objects.
Industry & Trade
The station has three main revenue streams.
The first is money they make from investments. The bulk of their assets continues to be their shares in all North Korean companies. All of these companies are basket cases, but they still hold a lot of assets and have tremendous potential and thus are worth a lot of money. These shares are being slowly sold off and the money is being laundered into other, anonymous investments.
The second is selling illegal biotech research. Purchasers must carefully conceal these transactions and then launder the research until it becomes clean enough to resell. Additionally the hives are sometimes willing to pay good money for illegal research. The station biotech researchers have developed techniques for accelerating the growth of humans, so they don't have to wait 18 years to find out if a given germ line modification proves fatal in adults or not.
The third revenue stream is selling cut-rate software services. These are performed by poorly trained slave labor - most of whom are also guinea pigs for the biotech research efforts. Their accelerated growth means they are much younger than they appear.
Infrastructure
The duct tape and bailing wire repairs results from a common practice of the lower classes. Intelligent maintenance workers incorporate subtle modifications into their repairs which cause the systems to malfunction again without the regular intervention of someone who knows the exact, quirky nature of the modification. If that worker is killed, imprisoned, demoted, or just feeling disgruntled, these critical systems will eventually fail and prove surprisingly difficult to troubleshoot. Being caught engineering such quirks is a very serious offense, so just as important as engineering the quirk is to engineer a plausible reason why the worker needed to deviate from the original design of the station. Often one points out that a shortage of proper materials or tools necessitated the modification, and thus it can often be necessary to "engineer" materials shortages or tool breakages.
Knowledge of these engineered quirks is a valuable commodity and sharing them can indicate a real bond of trust. Accumulating a large portfolio of quirk knowledge is to accumulate power and promotion. Once promoted however, one is required to delegate many tasks, which can require filling in underlings about previously secret quirks. Reporting your boss' secret quirks to his boss is a quick way to curry favor, but it is also dangerous. Rats often succumb to "accidents".
Another trick, which works especially well for getting rid of enemies is to reveal your "discovery" of someone else's engineered quirk, often after that quirk has caused a disastrous problem for some important person. This will often result in the severe punishment or execution of the "guilty" enemy, and sometimes the promotion of the "discoverer". This scheme is so easy to pull off that extra proof is usually required. Ideally the quirk was put in place at a time or place where it would have been "impossible" for the "discoverer" to have been there. Better yet is if the "guilty" party was known to have been in the area by themselves. (Due to the risk of quirks, being alone is considered extremely suspicious and opens one up to being framed. On the other hand, it is often necessary for some parts of quirk engineering.)
More common though is friends using quirks to get each other out of trouble. If a friend is being tortured, one might opt to turn off the power or life support to the torturer's apartment. Desperate calls from a torturer's family can tremendously improve the situation for his prisoner.
The practice of engineering and hoarding secret station quirks is essentially universal among workers on the station. Cooks know which cutting boards are clean and which will cause food poisoning. Electricians use deliberately confusing and dangerous wiring schemes with concealed timers which randomly cause power outages. Programmers make deliberately confusing computer code riddled with hidden back doors. Life support technicians route data signals over wires used to power prison cell lighting. As a result, fiddling with the prison lighting in a very specific way can be used to turn off life support to different areas. Biotechnicians hoard virulent pathogens, habitually inoculating themselves against as many infectious agents as possible without getting caught.
The entire station is essentially one giant booby trap with a thousand people quietly pushing tens of thousands of reset switches every few months. Which is not to say the booby trap never goes off. It's more or less continually experiencing the revenge of one or another disgruntled or murdered technician.
Living technicians are unable to flex their power too far though. Knowledge of their quirks can always be tortured out of them. Dead technicians are free to reach for the stars, and for this reason impulsive executions of surprisingly well-quirked workers have lead to some of the most harrowing incidents on the station.
History
The first genetically engineered pandemic spooked the leadership of North Korea. They either had to quarantine themselves within a compound and run the risk of giving coup plotters freedom to operate, or they could travel as needed to assert authority and run the risk of dying from the pandemic. Either choice was extremely risky.
As a result, the top leadership developed an audacious plan. They opened diplomatic channels with the nations which came to be known as the 5 partners (North Korea plus the USA, China, South Korea, and Japan), offering to sell nuclear weapons in exchange for cash. They would continue to manufacture new weapons as fast as possible, but the contacted nations benefited by maintaining the North Korean nuclear arsenal at low numbers.
With this cash they invested in plans for a North Korean space station. They knew the launch loop was under development at that time, and they hoped to be able to use it to launch space station components.
As the design neared completion, the cash needs of the project increased. Leadership began raising the price they asked for the nuclear weapons. In talks with South Korea they laid their cards on the table, explaining the plan in detail. As construction of the station progressed, they would prepare North Korea to reunite with South Korea, ultimately under South Korean leadership.
Upon completion of the space station, the North Korean leadership will move into it. All North Korean government companies will be privatized with North Korean leadership receiving a negotiable percent of the resulting shares. The more money these companies are worth, the more money the leadership will make, so they will do everything in their power to manage a smooth unification. The other five partner nations were extremely skeptical, pointing out that there would seem to be little the NK leadership could do should the other five partner nations renege once the country had become reunified. The leadership hinted darkly that they had contingency plans for this very likely eventuality, which they were not ready to discuss at this point.
Still, talks dragged on with the other five partner nations struggling to reach consensus within each of their governments. Then the first nuclear terrorist incident destroyed a major developing world Pacific port.
The North Koreans denied that the weapon was theirs, claiming that every one of their weapons was in inventory and accounted for. They suggested an Iranian or Pakistani provenance. The isotopic profile was ambiguous, not exactly matching any known weapon profile. The fishing boat which carried the weapon was locally registered, but with a murky itinerary. It seemed to be connected with organized crime and smuggling, but the trail ended there.
The North Koreans didn't press the point. They didn't have to. The project was approved and accounted for a significant fraction of the first several years' cargo carried on the launch loop. The leadership were good to their word, doing a surprising amount to facilitate a smooth transition of power, although whenever the other five partner nations failed to cooperate fully, the leadership always made trouble.
Smooth is of course not the same thing as ethical. They shut down re-education camps, releasing those they felt they could and killing the rest. Bodies were dug up from mass graves and incinerated. Then the foundations of new factories were poured over the site. High ranking officials who were not important enough to get a ticket to the station, but whose hands were too dirty to have a place in the new democratic government were very difficult to keep in line. When they proved too problematic, they were dealt with through a long series of show trials and charged with crimes against humanity. Usually these trials resulted in a death sentence by hanging and leniency for their families (if the now impoverished family remained docile). If the families made trouble, they would be charged as accomplices.
The station was considerably smaller than Paradise, although considerably larger than the ISS. It spun to produce gravity, and was designed for Earth orbit. Upon completion it was supposed to be boosted to medium Earth orbit by a fusion tug, but the tug never decoupled from the station - becoming its permanent engine. It then began an erratic series of boost burns which eventually raised it out of Earth orbit and into a roughly 1AU solar orbit.
Communications from the station were also erratic, with active trading and negotiations occurring for a few days, and then utter silence for weeks. It was very difficult to justify not confiscating the ill gotten gains of such monstrous criminals, and the democratic nations did begin to renege on the agreement they had reached with NK leadership, but then they received a set of coordinates, cryptographically signed by the NK space station.
Upon visiting the location specified by the coordinates, a concrete box roughly the size of a coffin was discovered buried. It contained a machine which, upon receiving a coded radio signal, was designed to break a small glass vial containing what was later discovered to be genetically engineered, weaponized anthrax spores. Upon breaking the vial, a cylinder of compressed gas would spray the spores at least 50 meters into the air, whereupon they would float in the wind for miles before descending on the countryside.
The space station then transmitted files containing grainy scans of photos and typewritten papers documenting a long term and methodical bio-weapons program involving multiple strains of various pathogens, including smallpox and a multi-drug-resistant plague. Confiscation efforts were quietly shelved.
An intensive effort to find the other buried bio-weapon devices was quietly started. More were found, but progress was very slow. They were detectable from the air by thermal imaging, but they looked identical to any 60 cm diameter boulder lying just under the soil. They were detectable by metal detectors, but again they just looked like one of several million large pieces of buried metal. They required electric power, and this proved to be their biggest weakness, as many were found by tracing an anomalous live wire underground when it seemed to have no purpose being there. At least one was found to have been powered by a small turbine located in a drainage pipe. No master list of buried devices has ever been found and the people involved in installing the devices either didn't know what they were doing, escaped on the space station, or were killed.
The unified Korean government kept the project to find the devices secret for several years, but it was eventually leaked to the media by multiple parties who though the risk that a device would be accidentally triggered was greater than the risk that one would be stolen, or triggered by the people on the space station. Several more devices have been found since publication and none have been triggered in anger. Several devices were found to be missing their pathogenic payloads, but there was evidence that these were never completed rather than having been stolen.
The radio devices have been closely examined. Each was set to a different frequency and listened for a different code. Many were found to be non-functional.
Architecture
As one might expect, areas frequented by the leadership are spotless and well maintained. Other areas are dilapidated, filthy, and desperately run down. Everything about the place would feel profoundly weird to an outsider. Stylistic elements are jarringly incoherent. Glittering neo feudal style is jumbled together with old retro maoism, alarming duct tape and bailing wire repairs, the oily stains and peeling paint of neglect, and the occasional piece of conspicuous imported luxury or modern technology.
Type
Orbital, Station
Population
Approximately 1200
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