The Knot
The Knot is a Curiosity-turned-spaceport, the largest in the Conflux. The Knot is a Klein bottle, a type of hollow four-dimensional manifold that’s essentially two Moebius strips pasted together. It can exist in three-dimensional space only because its “skin” is in constant rotation similar to how a planet travels through a fixed orbit.
The Knot is an important commercial hub because, by virtue of being the closest major port to the Engine Star, it’s often the layover for the shortest path between planets. It’s run by Mather College of the Catallax, and it maintained a policy of strict neutrality during the War: The only place in the Conflux where the belligerents’ soldiers and sailors could peacefully meet and talk and drink together.
The Knot is separated into several districts, built onto plates that slowly travel across the Knot’s interior and exterior in cycles as the Knot twists and writhes. Each district is spread across multiple plates, so the shape of each district changes to different configurations over the course of each cycle. Some of the plates along the borders of each district separate from the main district for parts of the year, but administratively, they’re still considered the same district even when they aren’t contiguous.
Districts
The Docks
The biggest and most important district is the Docks, which handle all of the Knot’s legal shipping. The Docks were built so big because, as the Knot’s skin moves and the Knot folds over itself, it would ensure that there would always be enough accessible berths to accommodate all the traffic. The main docks in the district are Summerport and Winterport, which in most configurations are at opposite ends of the district so that Winterport is accessible during the parts of the year where Summerport is inaccessible (because it’s facing inward to the Knot’s hollow). Each of these docks has extensive warehouse facilities, serving as overflow and long-term storage while inaccessible.
The Docks are run by the Knot Customs Office (KCO), the most powerful branch of the Knot’s administration. The KCO collects docking and warehousing fees, franchise fees from corporations and ships chartered at the Knot, and transaction fees from the Knot Mercantile Exchange. Many KCO customs agents are also secretly members of the Proxies, the most powerful gang in the Knot, and collect protection money from shipowners in the know so that the other gangs don’t touch their ships or warehouses. Near its main office, the KCO oversees the Knot Mercantile Exchange, the second-largest commodities trading market after the First Traders’ House in Windlee on Carannon.
Throughout the Docks, countless small shops sprout up between the facilities, businesses, and warehouses like weeds. These shops are everywhere in the Dock, and the market they form collectively is known as the Gangenmarkt, although there’s no formal organization or anyone in charge, except for Proxies collecting protection money. The Gangenmarkt sells everything from cheap souvenirs and snake oil to black market tech and smuggled Nephelium drugs and artifacts.
While the Knot has more bars and nightlife in the entertainment District, sailors and navy veterans tend to prefer the locations at the Docks. Hemlock’s, in Summerport, was a popular Malleon bar for shore leave among Malleon-Isan sailors visiting the Knot. Run by a grizzled Malleon ex-Marine captain and privateer named Jossler Scaithe who’d retired long before the War, it’s now known in particular as a hangout for ex-Malleon Navy officers-turned-privateers. Feron veterans and sailors prefer Äuserhimmel, a beer hall that catered to the Feron Legions during the War. The Knot’s uneasy neutrality during the War often collapsed into drunken brawls between the two bars’ patrons, but the KCO kept these from escalating to riots. Sailors from the two bars still go from one to the other when they’re drunk and looking for trouble.
Sailors from all sides are welcome at the Crystal Palace, the Knot’s Haze den. Haze, a Nephelium-based drug that’s smoked from a hookah-like device and induces a dreamlike trance in users—or a fugue state when used in excess—is illegal in the Knot. A mysterious figure known as the Principal, the kingpin of organized crime on the Knot and leader of the Proxies, owns the Crystal Palace, and he has an arrangement with the KCO for them to look the other way. The Knot’s security officers crack down on Haze everywhere else, making the Crystal Palace the only place for Haze addicts to get their hookup. It’s floor upon floor of half-aware junkies sprawled out on rugs, couches, and lounge chairs, cordoned off into “rooms” by tapestries hung from the ceiling, permeated by Haze smoke thick enough to give a slight contact high just from passing through.
Sailors looking for overnight companionship in the Docks go to the Mystique, the Docks’ brothel, with a reputation that spans the Conflux. Prostitution isn’t illegal in the Knot, but sex workers prefer to meet johns there because its madam, an Isan ex-I-Type gunner “Sister” named Selene Soraya, has an arrangement with the Proxies to keep her men and women safe, even when they’re off the clock. If something happens to one of her people, the perpetrators disappear, and everyone knows it. The ground floor is an upscale strip club, and patrons who settle on an agreement go upstairs to the Rendezvous Rooms. Parties can also be arranged offsite, as long as the Mystique gets its cut.
Drunks or anyone looking for cheap entertainment go to Carnival End. (The name is a joke by its forgotten founder, since the shape of the Knot means there isn’t any “end” anywhere.) Carnival End offers street food, games of skill and chance, charlatans of all sorts, underworld brokers looking to move contraband or sell illicit information, and Joker’s Tent of Wonders, an exhibition of real (but impractical) and fake Enigmata run by a grifter whose real name no one seems to remember.
Temple District
The Catallax run the Knot, but they maintain a policy of total religious freedom because they believe that open debate will inevitably demonstrate the superiority of Catallax philosophy. Owing to the Knot’s position as the closest major city to the mysterious Engine Star, as well as its orbit over Gethen’s reality-warping Nephelium storm, the Knot attracts pilgrims from organized religions and adherents to strange cults alike.
The largest complex in the Temple District is the Catallax’s Cathedral of the Final Bridge. The Cathedral’s main chamber is known for keeping its main chamber partially submerged. The Catallax religion, known as the Manifold Voyage, uses rivers and bridges as its main symbols. The Cathedral has “rivers” running through the pews, so that worshipers pray barefoot with their feet submerged. The path from the main entrance to the altar requires crossing many “bridges” over these “rivers,” representing the spiritual journey of the Catallax faithful. The altar is a “bridge” leading upward to a huge scale model of the Engine Star, representing the Catallax belief that the Final Bridge on the Manifold Voyage to enlightenment is somehow deep within the Engine Star’s core.
The second-largest, and secretly the most important, is the Temple of the 108 Lanterns. This Temple is dedicated to the larger Perenni sect of the Isan religion, but it welcomes all comers, regardless of religion. The Temple is dedicated to astrology, and the novices there maintain a huge scale model of the relative locations of Gethen’s 108 moons on a large, raised platform. These are the 108 Lanterns, and the novices move them by hand to reflect their up-to-the-moment positions. The Perenni believe that the positions of the moons determine the tides of fate, and they pray at the Temple for good fortune or to end a run of bad luck. Perenni pilgrims also travel there to undertake the Isan-Kanri ritual, in private chambers where they are guided one-on-one by the Temple’s qasats. (A qasat is an Isan religious leader, like a priest, rabbi, or imam.) Soothsayers from the Temple tell fortunes for a fee, and these are popular enough even among non-Isan to support the upkeep of the Temple.
But the Temple of the 108 Lanterns’ real purpose is to serve as a front for the Conclave’s Lodge of Lies. Most of the fortune-telling the Conclave does is made up, but the tidal forces of Gethen’s moons affect the planet’s probability storm. Tracking the positions of the moons helps the Conclave determine the safe spots and hotspots within the gas giant. In particular, the Conclave track Gethen’s two gateways into the Lacuna: The False Door, which leads to the Lodge of Lies (see below), and the Reiki, the largest known entrance into the Lacuna, big enough for entire ships to pass through. Ships attempting to travel into the Lacuna can enter safely onto if they have technology to energize the Reiki’s ambient Nephelium gases into a Wayserum-like protective slipstream—otherwise they would be ripped apart atom by atom and scattered across space and time. Previously, only the Conclave had this technology, but Admiral Nazzaretes discovered how to use the Vendetta’s (her flagship Hive) energy weapon to create that slipstream. The Conclave of the Temple and the Lodge of Lies don’t know how Nazzaretes can track the Reiki, but she’s been using it since the end of the War to evade the Armistice.
The Temple District is also home to one of the holiest places for the Isan’s minority Anastasi sect, the Temple of Forking Paths. Making at least one pilgrimage there to undertake a special Anastasi Isan-Kanri rite known as the Ritual of Selves is a requirement of the Anastasi religion. The Chamber of Selves is a maze-like hall of mirrors: Pilgrims ingest a Nephelium drug, and as they walk through the chamber, they see different versions of themselves in the mirrors who made different choices, including seeing the many possible deaths they avoided. The object of the ritual is to teach followers that enlightenment comes from embracing all their possible selves in all possible worlds, that they’re more than just the particular choices they made and the particular circumstances they found themselves in. The rest of this Temple is also filled with mirrors and reflective surfaces, making it extremely difficult to navigate. Visitors rely on blind monks—those who replaced their eyes with bionic sensor gear of some sort—to guide them through, teaching them that eyesight is vulnerable to illusion and misdirection but Nephelium visions are the truth.
The main Malleon temple in the Temple District is the Shrine of the New Ancestors. The Malleon revere both their actual ancestors and capital-A “Ancestors,” captains of industry who led their Bankhouses or corporations to success and glory. The Shrine is dedicated to the Malleon pioneers and entrepreneurs of the Conflux, the men and women who founded the Conflux’s big Malleon businesses. The Shrine keeps statues, portraits, and other icons of them. When Malleon go to the Shrine to light candles in remembrance of their own ancestors, they also often light candles at Ancestors’ icons, leaving offerings of coins underneath the candles to “buy” their intercession in business ventures. Candles atop the tallest stacks of coins are thought to be the most likely to be “accepted” by the Ancestors, a belief that keeps the Shrine’s coffers comfortably full.
The other large Malleon temple is known as the Church of the Singularity. The Church of the Singularity is controversial: Many accuse it of being more of a pyramid scheme than a genuine religion. The Church of the Singularity believes that it can bring about a utopia by building an AI so intelligent that it can upgrade itself, eventually becoming a god. The goal of Singularitists is to purify their brains so that, after death, they can be extracted and added to the machine, which is made from a network of these brains. Many consider Singularitism to be a scam, because achieving each new level of brain “purification” always involves giving more money and doing more work for the Church. And because only the Church’s inner circle is allowed to see the Singularity Machine, it’s widely suspected that the leaders who claim to be only following the Singularity Machine’s proclamations are really making it up to suit their own selfish interests.
The only Feron temple in the Temple District is the Pyramid of the Shrouded Totems. The Feron religion is a state religion, and all Feron worship from temples or texts not approved by the state is considered heresy and punished severely. In particular, the Feron state only allows the worship of the sixteen animal totems of the sixteen officially recognized Feron clans. Because the Knot is neutral and protects freedom of religion, worshipers of unsanctioned totems set up shrines there with totem poles covered by black shrouds, and these eventually were organized into the Pyramid to keep all these cults away from curious eyes, especially those of the Feron’s Falconroost secret police. The priests who tend the totems only reveal them to trusted faithful. These totems aren’t just for real-world animals, many also feature strange and grotesque creatures native to the Conflux, from places like the wilds of Cadfall and the depths of Ranweth. Many of these are worshipped in occult rituals, often involving self-harm to create ritual bloodsteel scar designs, and rumors persists that some of the cults of these totems practice human sacrifice. The Serk, a group of Feron-Isan militant fanatics who replace parts of their bodies with bionics modeled after these chimeric animal totems, use the Pyramid’s priests to identify potential recruits.
Entertainment District
The Knot’s Entertainment District is officially run by a joint venture between the Knot’s administration and the Malleon Bankhouse Theo Hale, but in practice the Knot lets Theo Hale run the show. The Entertainment District has attractions for adults and families, often featuring characters and settings from Theo Hale’s largest company, Argent Entertainment, which owns the Conflux’s most prominent pop-culture franchises. The Entertainment District is known for its Promenade, but, because the Knot is ever shifting, the particular destinations that are on- and off-Promenade change with the seasons.
The biggest attraction in the Entertainment District is the Sakura, short for the Sakura Theo Coliseum, named for Theo Hale’s most revered Ancestor. The Sakura primarily serves as a venue for sports, but it also hosts other large gatherings like concerts, circus-style performing arts, rallies, etc. In honor of the coliseum’s namesake, the Sakura’s façade and interior is made mostly from cherry wood and decorated with elaborate cherry blossom holograms.
For true aficionados of the Knot, however, the destination is the Fandango, a club and performance venue known for featuring acts that go on to become Conflux-wide obsessions. The Fandango is known for the Escher-esque design of its space, using artificial gravity and floors that protrude at odd angles from the floor, walls, and ceiling, along with floating platforms suspended with anti-gravity tech, to allow fans to listen or dance from all kinds of crazy positions and angles.
The Entertainment District is also famous for the holo-painters that ply their trade along its Promenade. Holo-sculpting uses a similar technology to Bubbles, but traps in air that contains small amounts of a Nephelium gas that can be induced to change colors. Holo-painters step inside these spaces and use “brushes” to paint colors in three dimensions. Experienced holo-painters can do this so quickly that it looks like they’re dancing while a three-dimensional, spectral-looking painting forms in the wake of their movements. It’s a mesmerizing sight, and the best holo-painters aspire to draw large enough crowds to move up to booking performances at venues on the Promenade.
Underneath the entertainment venues, family attractions, casinos, bars, clubs, and restaurants is a bustling black market for Nephelium-based party drugs. The Malleon gang known as the Waders, from Windward on Carannon, and the Anastasi Isan gang called the Lotus Eaters, from Shakhrazin on Ranweth, have fought over this drug trade for years. The Waders are supplied Nephelium drugs from corrupt officials within the Garu Reese Bankhouse’s Soma Drug Company, drugs that are so experimental, dangerous, or addictive that even the controversial Soma can’t afford to be associated with them. The Waders let Soma market these drugs anyway without a paper trial to lead back to them. The Lotus Eaters get their drugs from crooked qasats at Shakhrazin’s Lotoph Basin Temple, who use the apothecary skills they learned to brew the religious drugs consumed by temple worshipers to craft designer party drugs from the Nephelium-laced plants found in Ranweth’s jungles. Apart from making occasional drug busts for show, Theo Hale tacitly allows the drug scene in the Entertainment District as long as the violence between the gangs is kept out of the general public’s view because both gangs generously bribe the bankhouse officials.
Manufacturing District
The Knot’s Manufacturing District is one of the largest industrial centers in the Conflux. All the Malleon Bankhouses own manufacturing companies of various sorts that maintain factories there, and independent Malleon colonist-owned businesses from elsewhere in the Conflux also outsource production to factories on the Knot. Feron state-owned businesses have a smaller factory presence there, and these facilities serve as fronts for the Feron’s Raven clan to conduct industrial espionage against Malleon and Isan manufacturers. The Isan mostly prefer to use factories on Almweth or Isan-controlled moons or stations, but the Malleon-Isan cooperation during the War inspired Isan entrepreneurs to incorporate more Malleon tech into Isan products, and the Isan companies that depend on Malleon-made components set up factories in the Knot to source directly from the Malleon manufacturers there.
The Manufacturing District’s most significant factory is the Quantum Foundry, run by the Arcturus Karo bankhouse’s Blackstone 9K corporation. The Quantum Foundry is the only factory in the Conflux capable of creating tech that incorporates quantum entanglement on an industrial scale. Certain types of Nephelium-infused objects can be put into a quantum duplication chamber at the Foundry, which bathes the object with refined Nephelium gases harvested from Gethen to create a “ghost” copy of that object. The ghost copy slowly fades out of existence—the specific half-life depends on the object—but while it’s still there, anything that happens to the original happens to the ghost instantaneously, regardless of distance. Most importantly, this allows for faster-than-light communication, because a machine that can write data on the original will write the same data onto the ghost, at any distance. This can work as a two-way system if one device has an original and a ghost object, while the counterpart device has the corresponding ghost and original.
The Manufacturing District is also home to Meeks, a black market run by a half-Malleon, half-Feron fence named Marcellus Meeks. Meeks is the place to offload anything too hot for small-time fences, and it’s also a one-stop shop for gangs or freelance criminals shopping for illicit or stolen weapons, tools, and other gear. Meeks stays in business unmolested by generously bribing both corrupt administration officials and the gangs: Anyone caught ripping Meeks off ends up hunted by the entire Knot for a lavish contract price. Meeks operates several rotating locations at once, and it occasionally lets security know about locations it abandons, leaving some contraband there so that security can pretend to be busting crime in the district.
The Manufacturing District’s complicated politics have also made it ground zero for gang warfare in the Knot, with the various business concerns paying gangs under the table—often with weapons and tech to use or sell at the black market—to steal from and sabotage opposing businesses. (See below for a short background section on the various gangs.) The big businesses, especially those funded from off-station, can bribe enough of the gangs to work in peace, but if a smaller factory falls behind on its protection payments, it won’t be long before the feeding frenzy tears it apart.
Agriculture District
The Knot’s Agriculture District, managed by the Isan-run Mazzo Victuals Company, contains a combination of solar and lamp-based farming facilities to keep enough food growing to feed the Knot year-round. The Agricultural District was originally intended only to provide enough food to keep the Knot self-sufficient and safe from food supply disruptions, not for export. But when the granaries started to fill up, Mazzo invented Proteinloaf, a combination of processed grains and synthetic meat-like proteins derived from its cheapest and most productive plant cultivars. Proteinloaf in its most basic form is only mildly distasteful and provides all the nutrition needed for surviving in deep space, in a dense package with a shelf life measured in centuries. Nobody wants to eat Proteinloaf, but it’s the most efficient backstop against starvation in the Conflux, and responsible ship captains keep stashes onboard for emergencies.
The Agricultural District’s growing facilities are a marvel of automation, micromanaged to ensure optimal yields no matter how the District’s sectors move along the inside and outside of the Knot. Vast arrays of conveyor belts and elevators move plants to positions among many lanes and tiers of hanging gardens, offset with artificial gravity to have plants “hang” at various odd angles relative to one another and zero-g planterss where plants grow outward radially. This lets them catch varying amounts of sunlight from the Engine Star or angle them inward toward grow lamps emitting customized light spectrums. Plants are mapped down to their DNA, and growth patterns are monitored by machine, with all that data fed into a central computer called Lia-Alpha. Lia-Alpha uses machine learning algorithms to manage the grow process, consistently producing more food year over year. Lia-Alpha had been designed in the hope of one day assisting the Isan back home on Karsa to help that cursed planet produce more food during a long hoped-for terraforming project, but Admiral Nazzaretes’s genocidal attack on Karsa and subsequent destruction of the Gate ended that dream.
The Agricultural District doesn’t have much of a criminal presence because there isn’t anything worth stealing except for components of the Lia-Alpha technology, which are protected by enough private security and automated defenses to deter looters. The Agricultural District’s main value for the Knot’s criminal element is that, because the system is almost completely automated, there are many places to use as hideouts and stashes where even the engineers charged with system maintenance rarely travel.
Administration District
The Administration District (or just “Admin”) is the Knot’s “forbidden city,” open only to the Knot’s Charter Members (called simply “Charters”), with visitors and guest workers needing to apply for temporary passes. Charter Membership is an expensive subscription service the Knot offers instead of collecting taxes, and it’s the Knot’s second-largest source of revenue after the fees from the Docks, offering access to Admin’s many amenities and exclusive experiences throughout the Knot. The Administration District houses the Office of the Administrator, who runs the Knot, along with most of the other government offices other than the KCO, which makes Charters the only Knot citizens with direct access to their administration.
Admin is designed to be a bubble of luxury with the Knot, with housing, stores, restaurants, and services so that Charters who choose to live there—and most do—don’t need to leave it on a daily basis. The most popular destination is the Forum, a wall-less high-rise that uses a Bubble on each floor to maintain climate control that feels indoors, but each side is open to the outside except for railings and load-bearing columns. The lower floors of the Forum offer upscale shopping and casual restaurants, while higher up are casino floors, fine dining, and high-end clubs and bars. The multi-level penthouse complex, Steel Sky, has a large floor of high-roller tables around a central dais for performers, with tiered floors around a circular cutaway in the middle, full of bar and table space, so everyone can see the act even from two or three floors up. Steel Sky also offers some of the best views of Gethen and its moons, when it’s on the outside of the Knot, and the ever-shifting Knot interior, when it’s on the inside. Charters have access to exclusive locations in the other district, or VIP sections in venues open to all, but many stay in Admin most of the time anyway because the Forum and its surrounding entertainment and nightlife is appealing enough—and doesn’t require rubbing shoulders with the Knot’s working classes.
The Office of the Administrator looks more like a high-end hotel than a government building, with a circular high-rise residential tower for the Administrator and the administration’s high-ranking employees atop two wings of government offices. The Office’s most striking feature are the eight “waterfalls” that flow from the penthouse where the Administrator resides all the way down the sides of the tower, with the ones that land on the wings flowing along the roof, down to a drainage system around the Office.
Admin strictly controls access using checkpoints that use a variety of biometric data to ensure only Charters and authorized visitors and guest workers can enter. Drones patrol the airspace above Admin to protect against incursions from space, when Admin faces outward, or from other inward-facing districts when it’s on the inside. Anyone caught in Admin illegally is banned from the Knot, and any Charter who helps someone enter illegally loses Charter Membership permanently. While rules against drugs and other contraband aren’t enforced as long as they’re kept out of sight, black market sales are not tolerated and also lead to temporary or permanent loss of Charter Membership. The Proxies (see Gangs of the Knot below) have an understanding with Admin’s private security that if any gang or smaller criminal crew is caught operating in Admin, the Proxies hit them hard wherever their business interests in other districts are. Few criminals are stupid enough to risk provoking them.
University District
The University District (“UniDis”) contains a small campus for each of the Catallax’s eight colleges, as well as a campus of the Royal Malleon University, the Isan’s Quattrosferotti School, and the Feron’s Ilcar-Barca Academy. UniDis is known as a center for cross-cultural academic dialogue. The Knot requires total academic freedom, per Catallax custom, of all university spaces in UniDis. (This led the Feron, who censor academics on their various holdings, to use Ilcar-Barca as a dumping ground for intellectuals too persistent to silence but too prominent to disappear—in other words, the most interesting Feron minds who hadn’t given up and defected to the Catallax.) During one season of the year, the plates that make up UniDis line up so that all the campuses are arranged around a central space: This is called Debate Season, and representatives from all the colleges come to this Peers’ Square for organized battles of ideas that serve as a sort of Science and Logic Olympics for the Conflux’s intellectuals—imagine if the Nobel Prize were more like a direct competition—sometimes resulting in new ideas or discoveries that change life throughout the Conflux.
The Catallax campuses are relatively small, even though the trustees of Catallax’s Mather College appoints and oversees the Knot’s Administrator, because each college has a sprawling campus on one of Gethen’s large Cyfnoi Moons, as well as access to the All-College Observatory on Spyglass, the Cyfnoi Moon run by Coronal College. The Catallax who choose to study on the Knot work on projects that study cross-cultural relationships, require collaboration with non-Catallax academics, or involve the Knot itself in some way.
The Knot campus of the Royal Malleon University is the black sheep of that university system, famous for providing an academic perch for former Seasteader intellectuals after their side lost the Seasteader Wars on Mor. For the Seasteaders, who wanted to live on independent offshore platforms operating under their own law rather than the Crown’s, the Knot—a largely autonomous city-state with limited oversight from its Catallax rulers—is an ideal model to study and replicate elsewhere in the Conflux. RMU academics study everything from the social dynamics that keep the Knot running smoothly to the mysterious Nephelium artifacts that make the Knot habitable. The vision is to have the second generation of the Seasteader movement build space stations instead of offshore platforms, to finally be free from the great powers’ controll.
The Quattrosferotti School is an Isan college dedicated to understanding the reality-warping effects of Gethen’s probability storm and engineering practical uses for the various Nephelium gases and other chemicals that create it. Quatrosferotti School engineers invented the trawlers that bring back Nephelium resources and artifacts from within the depths of Gethen’s roiling storm, and they designed the Point Zero orbiting space elevator that brings their harvests from Gethen’s upper atmosphere to the Knot. A Quatrosferotti School physicist invented the technology behind the Manufacturing District’s Quantum Foundry, and the fees from licensing the technology to the Malleon company Blackstone 9K allow the School to operate tuition-free.
The Feron’s Ilcar-Barca Academy is the main bastion for Feron intellectuals who oppose the Feron’s post-War regime and want to reform Feron society from within. Both faculty and students are split into two ideological camps: The Januaries want to replace the Feron’s corrupt caste system with a liberal, individualistic system like the Malleon’s constitutional monarchy or the Isan’s free republic. The Junians also want to destroy the Feron’s caste system, but they would replace it with a fascist, totalitarian regime that puts every citizen in his or her “proper” role. Aside from its ideological conflicts, Ilcar-Barca is known for its modern art. The Feron state on Cadfall tightly regulates and censors artists’ work, maintaining that all art should serve the state. At Ilcar-Barca they’re free to make whatever they want, and the Academy’s artists have invented myriad new styles to convey the destruction the Feron both caused and suffered, as well as the anguish of ordinary post-War Feron citizens after the Feron’s defeat in the War.
The criminal presence in UniDis consists of the drug trade, black market bionics, and attempts to hack the various colleges’ confidential research projects. As elsewhere on the Knot, the Lotus Eaters and the Waders compete for turf to move drugs, but in UniDis this competition rarely erupts into violence, unlike in the rougher districts. There’s a high demand for black-market bionic limbs and sensory organs to assist in dangerous lab and engineering projects, and the Isan gang the Chromies (Perenni from Pratonuovo) fight with the Feron gang the Blackbloods for this trade. The hacking and black-market information trade is contested by the Feron gang the Raptors and the Malleon gang the Barbers. (See below for the section on the Knot’s gangs.)
Market District
While all the districts have various storefronts and shopping centers, the Market District is the main destination for buying and selling almost anything, legal or illegal. This district is run by a joint venture between all the Malleon bankhouses, who pay a franchise fee for the privilege to the Catallax administration.
The Market District is best known for Floatmarket, a shopping center whose large interior houses a zero-g field where shoppers fly from midair shop to shop using special thruster rigs and hooks that can latch onto guide cables that crisscross the space in three dimensions and anchor the shops there. While Floatmarket was originally designed specifically to sell objects and materials that would be damaged or destroyed by normal gravity—with special arrangements needed to transport merchandise from there to its final destination—it became such an attraction for tourists that shops of all kinds began opening there. Now, if you’re an interplanetary Conflux retail company, having a location at Floatmarket means you’ve made it.
For anyone venturing into the unpatrolled wilds of the Conflux, War Store caters to everyone from lone wolves looking to upgrade their personal kit all the way to private navies looking to place a bulk order of heavy cannons. Run by a Feron named Ilya Thrush, War Store has a special license to exhibit weapons and equipment that are otherwise banned from the Knot, but buyers must store them in a highly secure part of the warehouses in the Docks and only load them onto ships as they depart the Knot. War Store also secretly does business with the main arms dealing gangs: the Malleon Barbers and Feron Kings of Clubs, the main two gangs contesting the trade in melee weapons, and the Malleon Waders and Feron Muncoes, the two gangs that run guns and other ranged weapons. Thrush plays these gangs off against one another, causing violence that increases demand in the Knot for War Store’s personal defense equipment, but he ensures that this violence mostly takes place in the sketchier parts of the Market District or by the warehouses in the Docks where otherwise forbidden weapons are allowed to be stored. Thrush has an arrangement with the KCO where illicit weapons that disappear from the warehouses in the Docks are stamped as having been duly exported.
Outside of the main shopping boulevards, the black market thrives in the Mander Bazaar, a network of illicit but tolerated shops that reconfigure themselves as the Market District changes shape and moves along the Knot over the course of the year. All the gangs are active in these slums, and the more successful fences and brokers pay the Proxies handsomely to ensure that their establishments are neutral ground. Anything that can be bought elsewhere on the Knot can be acquired at the Mander Bazaar, though usually at inflated prices. Also a go-to place to offload loot that isn’t so hot it needs to be fenced at Meeks in the Manufacturing District, Mander Bazaar is a hangout for gang toughs and freelance crooks, with many of the great heists in the Knot’s history plotted in the back rooms of Mander Bazaar’s many dives.
Finance District
The Knot’s Finance District, like the Market District, is run mostly by the Malleon Bankhouses. The Finance District is one of the most important financial hubs in the Conflux, most importantly for issuing the most widely traded Conflux currency, Knot Standard Credits, or just “knotters.” (The buying power of a knotter in the late post-War years for basic goods like food and drink is roughly the same as a 2020 American dollar.)
Each of the Malleon Bankhouses has a lavish office building on the Square of the Ten, mostly for Bankhouse operations but with floors set aside for offices of each Bankhouse’s most important corporations and other holdings. Much of the economic fate of the Conflux is determined in conference rooms off the Square of the Ten, with Bankhouses forming alliances and joint ventures or negotiating sales and takeovers. The Square is also known for the Gilded Fountain, a circular fountain for water shows, except, using a Nephelium field, the “water” is actually liquid silver, gold, and other precious metals. (The energy of the field required to turn these metals liquid at normal temperatures would rip apart anyone foolish enough to steal from the fountain.) This fountain is ringed by etched sigils of each of the Bankhouses, each in front of the respective Bankhouse’s office.
In addition to their offices at the Square of the Ten, each Bankhouse also maintains a sprawling complex on other plates of the Market District for retail banking and vault storage. The banks run by the Bankhouses themselves are highly secured and monitored, especially their vaults, but the smaller banks popping up around them that aren’t big enough to be acquired by the Bankhouses are softer targets frequently looted in heists. The Bankhouses don’t worry about this sort of crime because their own vaults have a reputation of being nearly impregnable, with insurance in the rare event of successful heists and contracts with the Agency to recover any one-of-a-kind or irreplaceable stolen objects. The minor banks’ relative lack of security is, from the Bankhouses’ perspective, a competitive disadvantage: The expensive patrols around the Bankhouses’ banks don’t respond to calls from minor banks, who rely instead on cheaper rent-a-cops.
The major non-Malleon banks also have a presence in the Finance District, but only command a small fraction of the Bankhouses’ influence over the Conflux’s commerce. Feron banking is controlled by the state-run Bank of Cadfall, and any businesses seeking to open up factories on Cadfall or export goods there must establish a joint venture with the Feron state brokered through the Bank of Cadfall. The main Isan banks are the Prattonuovo Development Credit Union, or PDCU, which finances infrastructure and ventures across Almweth; the Explorers’ Bank of Shakhrazin, which provides capital for businesses operating in Shakhrazin’s Night Market and finances the spelunkers and treasure hunters who venture into the depths of the Khashokh, Ranweth’s deep rainforest; and United Credit Kestrem, the main Isan bank on Carannon.
In addition to legitimate finance, the desperate can also find the gangs’ loan sharks in the Finance District. While all the gangs have at least a side business in loans, the two gangs specializing in loan sharking are the Feron Kings of Clubs and the Isan Chromies. The Kings of Clubs, whose principal business comes from running melee weapons, found that loan sharking was a logical extension of their brand, because people who don’t pay their loans back become walking advertisements for the cruel efficiency of the Kings’ weapons. The Chromies’ main business is selling black-market bionics and cybernetics: This also created perfect opportunities to loan-shark because debtors tend to prefer paying the Chromies back at any cost rather than go through the “repossession” process.
Bio-Medical District
The Bio-Medical District (BMD), run by the Catallax’s Kenmouth College, houses the best research hospitals and clinics on the Knot, with patients coming from across the Conflux to be treated there.
BMD also offers the widest variety of implants and prosthetics in the Conflux, with manufacturers from each of the civilizations represented. The Isan are the best represented, with Kanri Boulevard taking up about as much space as the rest of the bionics sellers combined. These range from Perenni craftsmen, who make rough, practical devices, usually modular so that users can, for example, connect different hands to a bionic arm for different jobs; to Anastasi masters, who specialize in crafting and upgrading ornate bionics with intricate patterns and hidden functionality. The Malleon have Emmeline Row, where buyers go to find replacement limbs and organs that are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing or vanity upgrades made from expensive materials and hand-crafted by artisan bodysmiths. The Feron smiths at Stonefist Alley mostly make weapon limbs and implants that administer combat stims, and they also operate bloodsteel clinics for Feron and others who’d rather repair injuries with bloodsteel than traditional medicine. Finally, Kenmouth’s Ancension Biotech offers the Catallax’s advanced, metamorphic bionics, but only to Catallax-approved buyers under strict terms of service and for extravagant prices.
The gang activity in BMD involves the drug and bionics trades. The Lotus Eaters and Waders clash over the drug trade like in UniDis, although here they generally involve painkillers or drugs that ease acclimation of new limbs or implants, instead of the academic-performance-enhancing drugs popular in UniDis. The Chromies and the Blackbloods, as elsewhere on the Knot, are the main players in black-market bionics and cybernetics.
Gangs of the Knot
The Proxies
The only Catallax gang, and the one that regulates and taxes gang activity on the Knot, is called the Proxies. The Proxies’ main business is collecting protection money, which is more expensive than paying any individual gang but provides insurance against all of them, because the Proxies are the only gang in the position to guarantee that someone under their protection won’t be touched by any of the Knot’s gangs or freelance criminals. Anyone who violates the Proxies’ protection, no matter how powerful in the underworld, is made into an example.
The Proxies are run by a mysterious kingpin known as the Principal. Because the Proxies have infiltrated so many members into administration positions, and corrupted many more through blackmail and extortion, some savvy Knot citizens assume that the Principal must have some kind of arrangement with the Knot’s Administrator himself. Only the Principal’s most trusted lieutenants know the truth: The Principal and the Administrator are the same person.
The Chromies
The Chromies are Perenni Isan who come from Prattonuovo on Almweth. They deal in stolen and black-market bionics. They have a secret affiliation with the cult of enhanced assassins known as the Flock.
The Lotus Eaters
The Lotus Eaters are Anastasi Isan who come from Shakhrazin on Ranweth. They deal in drugs derived from exotic Nephelium-laced plants found in Ranweth’s Khashokh, as well as contraband stolen from Shakhrazin’s Night Market.
The Raptors
The Raptors are Avidae Feron, the ruling caste, who come from the Magnarx in Ilium on Cadfall. As is typical for Feron society, the Raptors dominate and control the gangs from lower castes. The other Feron gangs are expected to pay a portion of their collections as “tribute” to the Raptors, and in exchange, they can call in the ruthless and well-equipped Raptors when gang warfare gets heavy. The Raptors’ main lines of business are selling stolen Feron military technology and the hacking and information trade.
The Kings of Clubs
The Kings of Clubs are Klykovy Feron, the melee-focused warrior caste, who come from Cratertown on Cadfall. They deal in melee weapons and are one of the main gangs involved in loan sharking.
The Muncoes
The Muncoes are Makhla Feron, the ranged-focused warrior caste, based in Bombshell City in Skogrya on Cadfall. They deal in guns and other ranged weapons, and they also run one of the Knot’s largest money-laundering operations.
The Blackbloods
The Blackbloods are Naharad Feron, the peasant and working caste, based in Harsis in the Talbar on Cadfall. They run black market bionics and power armor.
The Waders
The Waders are Malleon from Windward City on Carannon. They run guns and other ranged weapons as well as Nephelium drugs produced by Malleon pharmaceutical companies.
