Rao

Rao

Rao is a continent of moderate size, but it is also the continent of perhaps the mildest terrain on all of Gaia — which is the reason that it is the continent that holds the large majority of Gaia’s population; 80% of the sparse human population on Gaia is clustered upon this continent, with 12% being on Telaraña, 5% on Nautilus, and 3% on Iris-Hong. As for Rao itself, it consists primarily of a rainy, temperate region, a large mountain chain (as a matter of fact, the planet’s largest) which separates the planet’s ecospheres, an arid would-be scrubland to the east of the mountains formed by its rain shadow, and to the south, where the climate is somewhat more stagnant, a hot and humid area. Rao is also by far the most prominent example of the regionalization that has taken place on Gaia, with de facto regional identities forming through the interplay of influence and politics.

Unlike Gaia’s other three continents, Rao was not named after a feature found on the continent. Instead, the name Rao is a tribute to the man who arguably saved humankind, who many of the original expedition members had great personal respect and sometimes (but not always) liking for, and who planted the very seeds for Gaians to become who they are now. Rajendra Rao, born in the Earth city of Khammam, was an astrophysicist of genius then beyond compare, and in his 30s he was the lead researcher on a project borne primarily (though far from entirely) on his own theories: the project that led to the first borehole ever created by humankind. Fifty years later, despite being quite elderly, Rajendra Rao was still an active participant in the borehole work necessary for creating the original expedition's interstellar capacities, if a remarkably reckless participant. Nonetheless, despite the fact that the man was the very first of the borehole-slinging, genius, space-time-bullying scientists that Gaia mostly consists of today, the expedition could only presume him dead with the loss of Earth. Yet, aware of the debt they owed him, even the more uptight members of what would become the Regime consented to naming a continent after him.

As with most of Gaia with the exception of relatively lifeless Iris-Hong, large beings dominate in Rao’s ecosystem, with large bush-like “plants” most common in both the western temperate and eastern arid areas, and small flora sparse enough it doesn’t cover the soil, which therefore only exists in the quantity it does thanks to a vibrant underground ecosystem. The southern part of the continent actually contains nodes of organisms similar to Telaraña’s vine macro-organism, but with the large herbivores that plod across Rao and feed upon them, they have not grown beyond building-size — which has led to a theory that the plate that makes up the western and southern parts of Rao broke off from Telaraña millions of years ago.

Rao’s biosphere, however, is actually an extremely touchy subject, a larger version of the debate that’s grown around the temperate portion of Telaraña — whether Gaia’s ecosphere should be made more hospitable to humankind or if it should be left as intact as it can be. The cat is out of the bag on this too, so to speak: the original expedition had samples of Earth plant and animal life for cross-testing and habitability testing, and many of these have been released unintentionally or even intentionally onto Rao in particular. The Gaian ecosystem not being much like Earth’s, there was a massive empty hole for this Earth life, and now Rao has an invasive species problem of massive proportions that some Gaians are trying desperately to cull and that some are encouraging along.

In the northern two thirds of Rao’s western, temperate, rainy region lies an area commonly referred to as “Regime land” despite the fact that technically the entire planet is, in fact, Regime land. What this actually means is that this area of Rao is [i]relatively[/i] devoid of the regional quid-pro-quos, jockeying, and questionable levels of control that define the rest of the continent, on account of the fact that the Regime’s capital, Aphelion (the point where a body is farthest away from the sun in its orbit — despite current hardships, it represents that humans WILL one day come back to Earth, and won’t be stopped) is situated here. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the Regime maintains a strict iron fist here, given that town-level officials are quite important, but it means that the Regime has the easiest time getting things done here.

Aphelion itself is by [i]far[/i] the largest city on Gaia, boasting somewhere in the vicinity of 200,000 people — a town on (pre-destruction) Earth, but by Gaian standards a teeming metropolis. It does take up a deceptively large amount of space, however, given that Gaian drones and construction techniques allow even far less populated areas to build up infrastructure. With somewhere as big as Aphelion, this means that the city has just about every kind of amenity that can be found on the planet, and additionally contains several large and important buildings, of course including the offices of the bureaucracies. Aphelion also holds places like the Earth Libraries and Museums, which contain a wealthy repository of pieces of culture taken or volunteered from the ship banks, personal computers, and lockers of original expedition members. The goal is and was for the people of Gaia to have something to remember Earth by — and while countless pieces of Earth’s heritage have been lost to the void, those that held them only presumable destroyed by whatever took down Earth. Nonetheless, Aphelion’s repositories have been an excellent fit for a very scientific and intellectual and... quirky populace, which has already taken these old media to heart.

Moving down to the hot and humid south, one enters “Khumaloland”, as it’s commonly referred to. No actual demarcation exists, as this area like all regions on Rao is simply a matter of de facto political alignments and so-to-speak “alliances”, but Khumaloland has a strong regional identity. Sibonalisa Khumalo was an administrator and higher-up aboard the expedition to Gaia, and when it became clear that the expedition would become the governors of humanity’s remainders, she acted to preserve values that she believed in, such as ethnic pride, caution in administration, and the radical position of “thinking twice before you play with exceedingly dangerous ideas before knowing what you’re doing”. She personally supervised much of the settling of southern Rao, and joined many of its officials together in deals, an arrangement which has now long survived her.

Khumaloland wasn’t actually named [i]after[/i] her, but rather named [i]by[/i] her, as for all of her talents she was undeniably an egotist, but her charisma and influence were so great that no-one particularly strongly wanted to say no. She’s been dead for decades now, and many of the people there have tired of the nickname, but it’s suck. Khumaloland is the most significant source of the professional but heavily distraught “sane” physicists on Gaia, and it sometimes exhibits political pressure to cut down on certain projects or to apply certain restrictions. This region of Rao is by far the most self-segregated, dotted with towns with notable ethnic communities, but despite this much of the region shares a surprising unity in their goals — and a bright side of this is that what invasive Earth specie shave been released here have been carefully managed, leaving Khumaloland with the cleanest environmental situation on Rao. Notably, though Khumaloland has, so far as this can actually be measured, more settlements overall than the Aphelion area, they are smaller in population, with Khumaloland’s biggest city, New Surabaya (named after an Earth Indonesian city and primarily Southeast Asian) sporting only a few thousand people, like Point Choi.

Finally, on the east side of the continent, where the rain shadow of the Sagan Mountains ensures a place similar in climate to some of Earth’s scrublands, lies the “Progress Sector”, the current name of an area with contentious political alliances which tends to reformulate itself every couple of decades as the people there decide another political paradigm would be more beneficial to them or would bring them closer to the bleeding edge of technology. The Progress Sector is, as their name implies, much the opposite of Khumaloland, with many of Gaia’s nuttiest scientists hailing from this area as the consensus from many of the people here — who figured that if they were willing to head out and stay in an alien planet’s desert and work the synthetics generators and the energetics deposits (smaller than Nautilus’, but what kept humanity through the first generation on Gaia), then they had better be willing to make the most of it... though many of the people here aren’t too keen on keeping stable institutions, or avoiding blowout lockdown policy arguments, occasionally necessitating higher Regime staff to pull rank and mediate.

As the eastern scrublands ARE arid, the Progress Sector is the least populated of Rao’s three de facto regions, but as most of the population is set around streams and oases, it actually has its population located in a few urban centers of relative size, with no less than three cities matching New Surabaya’s size — the city of Outlook (a positive outlook, its citizens will have you know!), the city of Yukawa (named after the first Japanese Nobel laureate, Hideki Yukawa, a theoretical physicist), and Borehole City (or one of several variants like Althaqab depending on your language — though hardly segregated, the city does, though a rainbow of ethnicities, have a significant if non-majority Arabic population) which is, well... it may be named rather on-the-nose, but it’s the kind of thing the residents like, after all. The Progress Sector also has the hub of Gaia’s synthetics productions, with several arrays scattered through the more empty areas of land so one exploding wouldn’t destroy them all, each manned and carefully monitored by the higher-ups and by on-site technicians.