Drift's Edge

I confess I approached Drift's Edge with certain preconceptions.

The Temple's records speak of the outer stations in particular tones—lawless, degraded, existing at the margins of proper civilisation. Places where the Song grows faint. Where the Collapse's long shadow never truly lifted.

Having now reconstructed the accounts of those who lived there two millennia ago, I find my preconceptions both confirmed and insufficient.

Drift's Edge was all those things. It was also home.

A Failure Held Together by Ancient History

The station was a cylinder—too many klicks long to walk in a day, they said—rotating in the darkness one light-year from Orpheus and the Nine Worlds. In the era before the Breakage, only Tower One remained fully pressurised. The rest of the station was "cold and dead as the black." Barely anything functioned except what absolutely must.

The inhabitants leeched heat and air from Tower One's overtaxed systems, building lives in the spaces that remained viable. Whether Drift's Edge still exists in any form, the current records do not tell me. Two thousand years is a long time for a station that was already failing.

Spacer logic prevailed there: up is to the rim, down is to the core. It did not matter which way your feet pointed. You adapted or you did not survive.

The Districts

Tower One

The heart. The only section where the station truly lived in that era. All other districts depended on Tower One's support systems—power, heat, atmosphere. Without it, Drift's Edge would have been a tomb.

The Vaults

I have spent considerable reconstruction effort on the Vaults, for this is where our subjects made their home.

The district was built from salvaged containers—each as long as most ships in dock, twice as wide. Vacuum-hardened and useful, but poor at keeping heat in. They hung off Tower One, halfway in the spin, perpetually cold. The last major expansion before the period of these engrams occurred a generation prior, when salvagers stripped a drift-tanker for its plating.

Within the Vaults:

• Multi-level apartments, stacked like cells
• Market Street, with its strip stalls and vendors
• The Afterburn, a bar that became a club when the hour grew late

Children darted through the corridors. Security scanners flickered at doorways. Serving droids rolled on monosphere wheels. Life, of a kind—preserved now only in memory engrams.

The Helix

Located on the outer rim of the spin, the Helix housed the station's elite. From there, top Rems claimed they could see out into the black—though Harrow suspected this was tall tales.

For Vault-dwellers like Silas, the Helix represented the promised land. Warmth. Cards. Easy booze. Contracts that matter. Recognition. The dream that kept the Vaults turning.

I wonder how many ever reached it.

The Docks

At the station's core, where the spin provided no gravity. Ships docked. Ships departed. The commerce of salvage flowed through.

What It Meant

Some within the Temple might ask why I document a place like this. Drift's Edge held no religious significance. No Seers walked its corridors. No Composers sang within its walls.

But this is where the Remnants lived. This is where they launched their expeditions into the black, searching for scraps of what was lost. This is where civilisation survived—not in glory, but in stubbornness.

The Edge had shipyards, in that era. Schematics pulled from wrecks were being printed into new vessels. The Peregrine was one of the first.

Something was being built there, in that place that should have died. Whether it survived the Breakage, whether any of it persists into my present day—the records are silent.

But I find I cannot dismiss what they attempted.

The reconstruction continues. I have much yet to learn about how people lived at the margins two thousand years ago—and what that survival might mean for all of us now.

~ NV