The Fabric

Mars in era of the Fabric

The Fabric is our solar system five thousand years in the future. A vast fabric of superintelligent machines surrounds and embraces the solar system and the advanced civilization constructed by humanity's descendants.

The descendants of humanity include people who look like humans and think of themselves as humans, though internally they are quite different from the humans that you and I know. They also include talking animals, robots and other machine intelligences, engineered life forms with exotic physiology, hive minds, and beings that are combinations of all these things.

The Fabric itself is the enormous network of microscopic computing devices that exists throughout the solar system. It's embedded in all the matter in the solar system, and even in the cells of living things. Nearly all beings in the solar system have a connection to the Fabric built into their bodies.

The Fabric is more than just the solar system's universal communication network, though. It's also a vast environment in which pure-software intelligences live and thrive. There are many more software intelligences in the Fabric than there are living beings in the the solar system, and they are much more intelligent and advanced. Over the five thousand years of the Fabric's evolution, they have carried it to every world in the solar system, to all the objects in the Kuiper Belt, out into the Oort Cloud, and beyond to the nearby stars.

Meanwhile, surrounded and protected by this advanced machine civilization, humanity's descendants have proceeded at their own pace, developing hundreds of thousands of communities made up of every kind of intelligent being you can imagine and probably some that you can't.