The Official Guide to the Okal Rel Universe

From Earth to Okal Rel

In the beginning, about 1,000 years before the events of the main series, there was Earth.

Late in the 22nd Century, life in North America is not that remarkably different from present day. Material progress has floundered for lack of economic and social wisdom. North America's share of world power continues to erode, slowly, as the world teeters towards greater global consciousness amid eddies of reactionary spasms and diverting preoccupations.

In particular, the dream of traveling to the stars is more or less on hold for lack of the means to do it in a way that is satisfying enough to inspire mass support.

The Alpha Colonies (Reetions)

The discovery of reality skimming as a means of faster than light travel changes everything, especially when the first explorers discover a world suitable for terra-forming. Earth rallies in response with a wave of enthusiasm. The best and bravest of all nations are sent to colonize the promising world of New Earth (which later became Rire).

Then, in a single day, the jump became impossible to navigate and contact is severed.

On Earth, the economic boom and international goodwill engendered by the project collapsed, and pitched the world into recession.

The settlers stranded on the far side of the jump are known as the Alpha Colonies. Mankind takes hold here, progressing through a series of boom and bust civilizations to the stability of the modern Reetion Confederacy with its transparent society based on ubiquitous observation by benign AIs: arbiters.

But the Arbiter Administration didn't come about without a serious jolt in the form of encountering Sevolites about 1,000 years after losing touch with Earth.

Sevildom

Reality skimming is a tricky technology. It requires a self-aware pilot, but it is physically and psychologically punishing. Fuel is not a problem, because rel-skimming (as it is known for short) draws on the binding energy of the fabric of space-time, itself, in a way that is analogous to a sailing ship using wind power, except for the directional limitations of relying on the wind. (That is, rel-ships don't have to tack.)

A rel-ship draws power from the very nature of space, just as nuclear power allows us to tap into the energy bound up in matter. Once a rel-ship's phase splicer does its thing, the ride is free from there on, at least as far as energy is concerned.

The down side is that a reality skimming pilot is the weak link in the system, despite being necessary, and not everyone has the potential for being a pilot.

After losing contact with the Alpha Colonies, Earth turned to the biological sciences to develop pilots who are better than any natural human at dealing with the rigors of reality skimming.

In the beginning, however, the idea was to create super intelligent people who would become great leaders, but things devolved into a mess fairly quickly. One of the original super humans, named Damien Lorel, escaped the backlash through clever political shenanigans, to transform his parents' company into a factory, producing sub human products. The products were called Sevolites after the company, Self-Evolved Limited.

Sevolites were originally made simple-minded and short-lived. They became capable of rebellion only through the intervention of Damien's wife, Sandrine Lorel.

Alarmed by Damien's godlike view of his own role in shaping humanity's future, Sandrine tossed some ordinary human DNA back into some standard Sevolites. Her "re-naturalized" Sevolites, and some of the more advanced "G" models developed by her son, teamed up with a rebellious group of human pilots called Beyonders and escaped to a marginally habitable planet designated GLN-10 (soon referred to as Gelion).

The original product lines of Sevolites that settled on Gelion were Sandrine's naturalized DMs, and members of the souped-up specialty lines called DM-Gs and VR-Gs. The DMs were specialized to be organizers and servants with a highly developed sense of order and hierarchy. DM-Gs were female courtesans: artistically talented, exquisitely beautiful, and with a great capacity for unconditional love. VR-Gs were based on the stock genotype for VR pilots, but the "G" line of VRs was made more aggressive and resourceful in order to function as gladiators for a decadent entertainment industry.

Since all the original DM-Gs were female and all the original VR-Gs were male, Sandrine hoped they would breed with each other, but they proved incompatible. Instead, she and her fellow Lorel leaders created male DM-Gs and female VR-Gs, resulting in the founding populations of the Golden Demish and the Red Vrellish, respectively.

Sandrine's re-humanized DMs became the first Blue Demish. The Lorels and Beyonders co-founded House Monitum, which is why it retains (at least in theory) a belief in equal rights for commoners, despite 1,000 years of intervening history.

The Great Lesson

Earth was not content to leave the new colony in peace, especially once it showed signs of thriving and Sevolites began to breed.

A war ensued.

The outcome was to become the "original sin" of Okal Rel - a religion based on eternal reincarnation that damns the souls of those who destroy irreplaceable worlds in their quarrels. In this case, the world concerned was Earth.

The apparent destruction of Earth in the war between the free Sevolites of Gelion and the enslaved VR products of Earth is the cautionary tale that encourages modern Sevolites to settle their differences more carefully on pain of dire consequences.

Enforcement of Okal Rel is political as well as spiritual. Anyone unimpressed by the threat of soul-death as punishment for okal'a'ni acts (that is, those who violate the fundamental, habitat-preserving doctrine of Okal Rel) is still subject to attack by those more honorable. The fact that the righteous get to confiscate the possessions of okal'a'ni transgressors they take out, is an additional motivation and another reason for being careful about one's reputation for honorable conduct. Honorable does not have to mean "nice" by our standards, only that you can be trusted not to put habitats at risk in the pursuit of your own rel, or struggle, for whatever it is you are after in life.

The Gelack Empire

It was not long before Sevolites rejected the notion that they were artificial human beings created by natural humans and the Lorels. In fact, natural humans soon became known as "commoners" and treated as inferiors. Claims that commoners created Sevolites became a heresy, and Okal Rel defended Sevolite rule over commoners on the grounds that commoners were the people whose souls were too weak morally, to stick to Sword Law, leading to their reincarnation at the bottom of the social order where their superiors could keep their dangerous okal'a'ni impulses under control.

Theologically, Sevolites had power because they could be trusted not to blow up the neighborhood. Commoners had equality once and as the story goes, that was the reason Earth was lost. Big mistake. Never let it happen again.

Other sects of Okal Rel deal with the details differently; however the basic ideas are pretty universal: namely, that the destruction of habitable territory is a sin deserving soul-death and that a system of legalized dueling known as Sword Law should be substituted as an alternative to conflicts involving reality skimming ships in space.

Now and then, of course, even Sevolites indulge in space wars, but the rule about not destroying habitats is still a big deal. Sevolites take part in sophistries to excuse this or that transgression in a way that would familiar to any historian; but there is still a strong and enforced bias against approaches to conquest that fail to respect the life-carrying capacity of environments. If there wasn't, there would be no usable habitats left to conquer. Either the power of rel-skimming or the devastating potential of Lorel bioscience for biological warfare would have exterminated all life in the universe long ago.