Technology of the Foundation

The technology of the Foundation is advanced by 21st century standards, but it still has a lot of limitations. What technology looks like also depends a lot on where you are and who you’re asking. There’s the kind of tech enjoyed by those in the Foundation “proper”, and then there’s the way things are out on the Rim.

A lot of technology that’s in use, especially out on the Rim, wouldn’t be unfamiliar to a time traveller from the 21st century. The ammunition may be caseless and the mechanism electropneumatic, but the guns are the same old designs which were good enough for the Old Earth. The same antigravity tech that makes space travel comfortable has been powering gravcars and aerocars for decades - but there are plenty of worlds where a reliable wheeled or tracked vehicle is preferable to a temperamental antigrav engine.

In the Core…

An oligarch awakens. She can trace her lineage back to the Foundation’s oldest families, all the way back to the “First Hundred” who founded Tabula Rasa in the first place. Her wealth and influence are so immense that they have their own kind of agency, a tangible presence that’s entirely separate from her person. Smart systems and autonomous agents manage every aspect of her life; she barely needs to conceive of a need, and it is fulfilled. She’s over a century old, but she doesn’t look a day over 40. She’ll live to be at least 200 before the longevity treatments hit diminishing returns. If, heaven forbid, something were to happen to her, a dozen people would know about it in within ten seconds.

One of her eyes is slightly lighter than the other, the only lingering artifact of a traumatic incident many years prior. The replacement eye was grown in a vat, and it works far better than the original - when she winks, she can make out the ghostly shimmers of the ultraviolet spectrum. Leaving the orbital villa where she spends her evenings, she takes her personal spacecraft down into the megalopolis that covers the planet’s urbanized surface. She values her privacy highly and often travels alone, but she’s not the one flying the ship. Her pilot is an autonomous system, sophisticated enough to manage every one of the ship’s functions while she relaxes.

As far as her nervous system is concerned, she’s not hurtling through the vacuum of space at all. She’s standing in one of the vast and ancient forests of the Old Earth, going through the guided meditation program she uses each morning. She doesn’t even feel the slight jolt of turbulence when the ship hits atmo and begins its descent.

In the Territories…

A technician is on their way to work at one of the great megacorporate manufactories that dominate the edges of the conurbation. The manufactory is also an arcology, a massive self-contained living space totally siloed from the outside world, so “going to work” just means taking an elevator and a tram to the factory floor. There’s no need to see the light of day; in fact, they haven’t taken the train out of the arcology and into the city in several days. As long as they meet their performance indicators and remain gainfully employed, almost everything they need will be provided by the company - and at very affordable rates!

The technician has something else that’s contingent on meeting their quotas: their left arm. No mere crude cybernetic prosthetic, it’s a true cyberarm, an augmented limb strong enough to prize open a jammed servo and resilient enough to clear away the red-hot slag that builds up on the casting press after a few dozen cycles. They’ve had it for one year, ever since the accident, and if they keep up the good work for three more then it’ll be theirs to keep. Otherwise, they’ll either scrounge up a prosthetic or they’ll make do without an arm.

As they reach their work station, wafer-thin lenses on each of their eyes project information into their field of view. Diagnostic data, partial schematics, warnings about intellectual property and negligence penalties. They run diagnostic reports and check in on all the systems responsible for running the factory on the way to their seat, collapsing menus and swiping open documents with a gesture or a flick of the wrist. The machinery of the manufactory rumbles to life around them; despite how sophisticated and automated it is, a human technician is still required to oversee it.

The technician supposes that they should be grateful for that.

On the Rim…

The captain of a free trader visits a dusty little town on the frontier of a young, struggling colony. He lands his scuffed and pockmarked old ship on the rectangle of concrete that passes for a landing pad, but not before waiting for someone to come along and chase away the livestock that had wandered onto it.

They are strange creatures, looking like a cross between a camel and a bull - except neither a camel nor a bull are covered in porcupine quills. Meta-terran animals, gengineered to be resistant to the local conditions decades ago by the colony’s architects. They look weird, but they’re cheap, reliable, and robust; they’re ideal for manual labour. The fact that they sometimes dislocate their joints to wriggle out of their enclosures is less than ideal (and creepy as hell to watch), but unforeseen drawbacks are just part of life when you’re working with meta-terrans.

The capitol of this colony, the captain knows, has a fusion power plant that’s big enough to keep the entire settlement running. Out here on the frontier, though, they make do with their wind farms and their solar panels. The next town over used to run on fission, but someone tried to cut costs in the wrong area, and now the next town over isn’t around any more.

The captain and his crew work together to get the shipment ready. They’re here to sell one of the many medicines this colony can’t produce on its own, a vital anti-cancer drug required to survive the planet’s ambient radiation levels. There’ll be an argument over the price, of course - always is. The people here will settle up in the end, though. They can’t afford a fusion reactor to run their town, but they’ll find a way to pay for the medicine in his cargo hold. They can’t afford not to.

The captain still holsters his trusty revolver, just in case someone’s gotten desperate enough to make a stupid decision. He checks his datapad, running a few numbers. Just 83 more trips like this until the mortgage on the ship is paid off.