Orpheus System & The Nine Worlds

The Temple does not speak often of the Nine Worlds. Not in any official capacity.

This silence is, I suspect, deliberate. The Nine Worlds represent something the Reformed hierarchy finds uncomfortable: a post-Collapse civilisation that has rebuilt without us. They have their own structures, their own authorities, their own relationship with whatever remains of the Song.

We are not irrelevant to them. But neither are we necessary.

The Orpheus System

One light-year from Drift's Edge—a distance that sounds manageable until you consider what it meant in human terms. Months of travel. Consciousness dissolved into the chemical sleep of cryo. High-g burns that pushed bodies to their breaking point.

And yet the Remnants of that era made this journey regularly. Orpheus 1 lay at the end of established shipping lanes, a destination for those who proved themselves at stations like the Edge. The system served as gateway to the Nine Worlds proper, where contracts carried weight and crews were treated as professionals rather than expendable salvage rats.

Or so the engrams tell me. Whether these routes still exist, whether the Nine Worlds survived the Breakage—I cannot say. Two thousand years of archival silence stand between those memories and my present.

The Nine Worlds

What little I have reconstructed suggests a confederacy of some kind—nine habitable worlds (one assumes the name was literal) bound together by trade, necessity, and shared interest in maintaining interstellar civilisation.

They issued contracts. They enforced standards. They expected demonstrated competency before allowing access to their work.

"Graduate through Drift's Edge," the phrase went. Prove yourself on the frontier, and the Nine Worlds might take notice. Fail—or worse, develop a reputation for unreliability—and the frontier is where you remained.

For Remnants like Silas, this represented the dream. Not merely survival, but legitimacy. Recognition. The chance to be something more than scavengers in the dark.

Reading these aspirations across two millennia, I find myself wondering whether the dream was worth the cost.

What This Meant

The Nine Worlds rebuilt. Without the Choir. Without the Temple's guidance. They pulled themselves from the Collapse through their own efforts and stood, in that pre-Breakage era, as living proof that humanity could survive the loss of the Song.

Some within the Reformed hierarchy viewed this as hope. Others viewed it as heresy—or worse, as competition.

I am not authorised to speculate on Temple politics of that age. I note only what the engrams preserve.

My access to Nine Worlds records is limited. The Vocem Initiative's writ extends primarily to frontier reconstructions—Drift's Edge, Hearthe, the scattered stations where the Song grew faint. Whether the Nine Worlds survived into my present, whether they have their own archives preserving these same memories from their own perspective—I do not know.

Perhaps someday those histories will align with ours.

Until then, I work with what fragments reach me across the millennia.

~ NV