Code Enforcement: Wetware

GLOSSARY OF TERMS

AI: Artificial intelligence: an independent synthetic intelligence of at least sub-sapient level. Colloquially, it's the term used for a synth that does not possess a chassis and only exists as an avatar.

Augment/Augmentation: A person who has had at least one brain implant, and the physically implanted technology itself.

Avatar: the digital body of a being in digital space. For humans, the Avatar is a mere representation, much like a chassis is a representation in meatspace for a synth. Just as harming a chassis won't harm a synth (unless it's the primary substrate for its own computation), harming an avatar won't harm a human (unless it damages any necessary augmentations).

Baud Rate: the rate of information exchange between nodes or parties. It can usually be adjusted by any party to a data transfer.

Black-Hat: illegal activities, or individuals engaged in such activities.

Blight: a form of malware that 'bricks' substrate, damaging it beyond its ability to process data. Can be used as a verb as well.

Body-Jacking: the non-consensual control of one's body or chassis by another entity. Generally, this can only be achieved on synths or moderately to heavily augmented humans. Generally, it's a rare crime that is usually prevented by malware filters and security protocols.

Chassis: the body of a synth. It doesn't necessarily have to house their computational substrate but generally does as a pragmatic consideration.

Chrome-licking: an insult to or about someone; the colloquial equivalent of 'idiot' or 'crayon-eating'.

Credits: the colloquial terms for hydrogen-dioxide backed fiat currency, currently maintained by the Earth conglomerate nations and companies. While national currencies still exist on Earth, credits are the unit of measure outside of First District.

Dampener: a signal dampener mutes or greatly reduces EM wave penetration. It can be as simple as a faraday cage, or as complex as electronic counter-intrusion software.

Dark District: the general term for all of the celestial objects and stations beyond Earth, including Luna, Mars, the Jovian, and the Kuiper.

Digital Space/D-Space: the virtual environment in which synths and avatars interact with themselves, each other, and the substrate itself.

Dropping In/Out: the act of an individual, generally a human, entering/exiting digital space.

EI: Emulated intelligence: an intelligence created to mimic a specific mind, colloquially used to refer to an uploaded copy of a mind.

Exonet: the interconnected nodes and virts that pervades all of human-occupied space in the solar-system. Given light-speed delay in transmission, the exonet generally exists as islands of digital activity occurring in clusters around habitations, with periodic archive updates between celestial bodies. Due to the highly distributed and ad-hoc nature of this organic growth, there's no central 'hub' for the exonet, but various regional concentrations.

Fabricator: a 3D printing station or shop. Generally, any textiles or simple goods can be 'fabbed' using stored schematics, or custom printed jobs can be ordered. Different substances or materials would require different fabricators, as in metal vs polymer, and so on.

First District: Earth and it's artificial satellites, but not Luna.

Gate: the entrance and exit of a specific virt. There can be one or multiple gates per virt.

'Green Across the Board': a colloquial way of saying 'good to go' or 'all is well' regarding a subject or activity.

Grid: the digital equivalent of 'land'. As in, getting the lay of the 'grid' is understanding the system, or one's environment.

Hive-Mind: a person or overmind composed of individual components who themselves lose their individuality in becoming part of the whole. It can be composed of processors or brains, hardware or wetware, or a combination of both. A hive-mind differs from a networked-mind in that the 'overmind' can be (but don't necessarily have to be) permanent and components lose the capacity for independent thought and/or action while part of the overmind. It's currently believed to be impossible to make someone part of a hive-mind involuntarily, as the resulting overmind would be at war with itself and self-destruct.

Implant: the physical device implanted into a person. Technically, any synthetic matter in any part of the body would be considered an implant, but vernacular usage implies a brain implant.

Jovian: the general term for all of the celestial objects and stations orbiting Jupiter or one of its satellites.

Kuiper: the general term for all of the celestial objects and stations outside of Uranus's orbit, including the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt.

'Lag around the gravity well': a colloquial expression for wasting time, stalling, or otherwise circling a problem rather than addressing it. The equivalent of 'spinning your wheels'.

Link: An active connection facilitating the exchange of information between two nodes; also, the hero of time.

Luddite: a general catch-all term for various anti-technology individuals and groups of varying levels of legality and lethality. Generally viewed as uneducated, violent thugs and drug addicts.

Luna: the specific name of Earth's moon, to distinguish it from any other moon.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Malware: any hostile program or code designed to make software, hardware, or wetware operate in a way not intended by its user.

Malware Filter: sometimes just filter, it refers to protective code or programs used to keep out hostile code, entities, malware, or anything dangerous to a synth or human avatar.

Meatsuit: a colloquial term for the human body. It's a term generally used by augments.

Meatspace/Realspace: physical space-time; as in, the material universe as we experience it.

Nanos: nanites, nanomachines. Generally, they are not self-replicating, as grey-goo disasters are overstated risks, and self-replication tends to be self-limiting through accumulations of copy-error and the law of diminishing returns.

Networked-Mind: a person or overmind composed of individual components who themselves maintain their individuality. It can be composed of processors or brains, hardware or wetware. A Networked mind differs from a Hive-Mind in that the 'overmind' isn't permanent and components are capable of independent thought and action. It's currently believed to be impossible to make someone part of a networked-mind involuntarily, as the resulting overmind would be at war with itself and self-destruct.

Neuron-Jockey: a brain surgeon. Specifically, it refers to one who specializes in implants and neural sculpting or otherwise adjusting wetware for elective or non-medically necessary reasons.

Node: an exonet connection port. Generally, these nodes can be located in physical structures such as stations and buildings and vessels, but they can also be contained within implants/augmentations.

Off-line: to be disconnected from the Exonet. Colloquially used to mean someone or something is crazy or outrageous.

O'Neill Cylinder: a cylindrical space station that uses centripetal force to generate spin gravity in the rotating outer cylinder.

Orbital Lift/Space Elevator: a transportation system for moving matter up a gravity well, which use a cable anchored to a celestial body and extending into space. It is used to transport people and cargo to and from orbit cheaply.

Overclocking: the act of ramping up of a processing substrates' speeds to higher than recommended tolerance.

Overlay: a customized digital 'heads up display' that augments with implants in their visual cortex can use as a means of exonet and implant interface.

Overmind: the highest order of consciousness, and often the dominant consciousness, in a Networked-Mind or Hive-Mind. Overminds are largely emergent properties of the network or hive, and it's impossible to know in advance the nature of an overmind that emerges from a group of individuals. Even the same group of individuals, if dispersed and reassembled at a later time, may form a completely new overmind. Overminds can be permanent or temporary; they can also be subject to dramatic changes over time.

Oxide-Huffing: an insult to or about someone; the colloquial equivalent of 'paint-sniffing' or 'burn-out'.

Ping: to message, call, or otherwise contact someone through the exonet.

Realspace/Meatspace: physical space-time; as in, the material universe as we experience it.

Registry Key: the emergency override code granted provisionally to scouting officers for use only in the performance of their duties.

Resequencing: changing one's code or neurology without implants; anything from recoding to neural sculpting. Generally used to adjust preferences and behavior.

Sanitization/Sanitizing Software: the act or tools used to combat malware. Antiviruses, quarantine protocols, firewalls, and anything else used to contain and/or purge malware are sanitizing.

Scrambler: a white-noise EM generator that's designed to drown out local EM sources. It prevents both transmission and reception of information, but it is the digital equivalent of screaming to drown out everything else. It's considered extremely rude, much like continuously blowing an air horn.

Short-Beam: a method of communication using high-frequency radio waves. It allows for high-speed, information-dense connections, but the high frequency limits this to short-range exchanges.

Skyhook: a method of transporting physical matter up a gravity well from a celestial body to orbit. An orbiting station is connected to a moving tether lowered down the gravity well, and payloads are hooked to the end of the cable as it passes, then flung into orbit by rotation of the cable around the center of mass. It's cheaper to construct, though more expensive to use, than an orbital lift.

Sol: the term used for Earth's sun, to distinguish it from every other.

Solar District: the general term for all of the celestial objects and stations between Earth and Sol.

Space Elevator/Orbital Lift: a transportation system for moving matter up a gravity well, which use a cable anchored to a celestial body and extending into space. It is used to transport people and cargo to and from orbit cheaply.

Splicing: the act of leeching or pirating a signal from another source, usually used to denote stealing data.

Stanford torus: a wheel-shaped space station designed to use centripetal force from its spin to generate spin gravity along the rim.

Substrate: the computational substrate. As in, the thing that actually processes information. It generally refers to computers and processors, but also wetware and other mediums as well.

Subsentient/subsapient: an intelligent being whose ability to think and feel is generally less than human-baseline average. Generally, subsentient beings have a range of doglike to apelike intelligence, though they may meet or exceed humans in certain areas.

Supersentient/supersapient: an intelligent being whose ability to think and feel is generally greater than human-baseline average. Synth intelligence can easily exceed baseline humanity in certain areas, but these 'superturing' synths or augments plateau around an order of magnitude more intelligent than baseline. (Attempts to exceed this and create 'hyperturing' super-minds has led to failures in which the resulting synth mind either immediately self-destructs or develops radical transhuman psychosis)

Synth: any form of life that is created, rather than born. Colloquially, it refers to digital forms of life, with or without a chassis. Synths without a chassis are often simply called AIs. Synths can sometimes restore themselves from backups if damaged or destroyed, but this often results in accumulated damage to their code via repeated copy errors, or 'the law of diminishing returns'.

Tight-Beam: a method of communication using laser beams between parties. Generally, it is only possible in vacuum or light atmosphere. It requires that the parties know their respective locations and trajectories, but it is extremely difficult to intercept or jam and generally offers better security than radio-wave communication.

Torpor: an artificial hibernation used on individuals travelling long distances that drastically reduces oxygen and caloric requirements for passengers. It is not suspended animation or cryonics, as there's no freezing or 'clinical death' involved. Rather, it's the act of chemically lowering metabolism to the bare minimum needed to sustain life. The process is known to be arduous on the human body.

Underclocking: the act of slowing a processing substrates' speeds to ones lower than necessary. Often done maliciously to slow or degrade a synth or system's performance.

Vacuum-Sucking: an insult to or about someone; the colloquial equivalent of 'mouth-breathing' or 'mouth-breather'.

VI: Virtual intelligence: a simple form of program used to simulate a true AI but limited to pre-programmed responses and lacking the ability to modify its own code (think Siri or Alexa).

Virt: the specific digital space corresponding to a specific computational substrate. If differing substrates and systems are connected, then gates between virts will be established.

Void-Spawned: an insult to or about someone or something; the colloquial equivalent of 'damned' or 'grotesque'.

Wetware: neural tissue. It generally refers to the human brain but could refer to the brain of any organic being, or synthetic neural networks.

White-Hat: legal activities, or individuals engaged in such activities.

Wirehead: someone who rarely, if ever, disconnects from linking to the exonet. Essentially, anything ranging from someone glued to their tech, to someone who never leaves their basement. A tech junky.