The Havens

Routing:
Or: Seattle 21
Des: Denver SLBBS
Date: 17:44:56/2050-03-14
    

Mayor Gasston:

The new construction visible in the Plastic Jungles is the creation of a group calling itself the Paradise Lake Haven. The population includes a large number of metahumans who fled the Night of Rage in 2039, and a fair amount of former squatters from the Redmond Barrens, most of them SINless. They have built their own vertical farms, in which they grow food and feedstock for 3-D printers, which is where all the material for those buildings is coming from. They are sufficiently well armed to keep out the local gangs, and organized enough to have the rudiments of government.

If they were in the middle of a well-patrolled neighborhood, we would have a crisis on our hands: they are, after all, an armed group that does not acknowledge the authority of the UCAS government. In the Redmond Barrens, though, they are feeding and clothing people who might otherwise be scavenging in patrolled neighborhoods. They even maintain city infrastructure; apparently, the local go-gangs trade road escorts through Z-Zones for fixing potholes on roads that City of Seattle crews don’t dare maintain. Their doctors don’t report gunshot wounds to us any more than the other unlicensed practitioners in the Barrens, but unlike the street docs, they insist on vaccinating people, which reduces the chances of a pandemic brewing there.

Some of our officers have had contact with the Haven. While the Haven has their own correctional system for their own people, they are quite happy to hand over anyone who goes in there and stirs up trouble, and they’ve even called us up to hand over a terrorist who was trying to use them as a hiding place. They treat this as an informal sort of extradition when it comes to violent criminals; they aren’t so friendly to debt collectors. A number of small thrillgangs have been decimated or simply wiped out after going up against the Haven. Lone Star has no official position on Havens at this time, but as a practical matter, they save work for us and don’t create it.

They have their own currency, which is only valuable within the Haven, and would be difficult to tax. (They have been there long enough to establish adverse possession, so you could easily make the case that they owe property taxes.) If you want to pay a visit to them, the community appears to be friendly and fairly safe; we would need to provide you with an escort to get through the Z-Zone. I doubt there is much to gain, though, as they are eager to point out that they pay no taxes because they receive no services from the city government, and evicting over ten thousand metahumans, many of them armed, for nonpayment of taxes would be an expensive operation requiring massive expense from the Metroplex Guard.

I recommend maintaining resource allocations for dealing with the gangs in the Barrens, and continuing unofficial contact with the Havens without any formal relations that could complicate future legal matters.

Lee Matheson, Chief, Investigational Division, Lone Star Seattle

ECONOMICS 101 — Professor Falstaff

Spring Semester Term Paper

GRADE: F

COMMENTS: Wildly inappropriate topic. Show this to other students and you’ll be expelled.

Decentralized Banking: the Haven Monetary System

We are all familiar with the operation of modern fiat money, where a central bank issues new currency, and may allow the further creation of money through fractional-reserve banking. When the bank is well-run, the amount of money in the economy stays roughly equal to the amount of value in the economy, and prices stay stable. Constant vigilance is required to make sure that money laundering and a shadow banking system do not thrive to support criminal activities.

In some of the spaces where the traditional economy does not reach, the falling price of information technology has made it possible for even SINless people to engage in productive commerce. A network of “Havens” has sprung up in places where cities no longer provide traditional infrastructure services as power, water, data, sewers, and law enforcement. Their commerce is in representative currency, where the units of currency represent physical goods (all of which have a shelf life ranging from days to decades, or even more for a few things like gold) or promises of labor— a time-based currency, building on a concept developed in the 19th century, where people offer allocations of their labor time in a near-term time window such as two weeks. This means that the money supply automatically scales with the goods and services available.

This, of course, sounds like chaos! How do you decide the fair value to trade between one person who has a chicken to sell and another who wants to sell promises of babysitting services? What happens if the babysitter gets sick?

The Havens have resurrected the notion of medieval guilds; almost no one buys services directly, but instead purchases them from a guild, who can supply equivalent labor if someone is unable to meet their commitments due to illness, injury, or vacation. The guild acts as an insurer, and as a certification body. It is in their interest to train people and share expertise.

The Haven economy is based on representations of real things: physical goods, energy, and promises of human and machine labor. The data record of any given thing is called a chit. It says who made it, what it’s good for— a live chicken, an extra-large pizza with two toppings, an hour of you exercising any skill you offer, a healing spell that leaves you wanting to take a nap— and it has an expiration date. If it isn’t redeemed by someone acking receipt of the good or service within the expiration date, it’s canceled and worthless.

Each Haven has a local currency that is issued on a regular basis, usually weekly, and that currency comes with an expiration date, which is usually twice as long as the issuing period (so with a weekly issue, the currency loses all value in two weeks). These credits (¤) are defined to reflect the price of a particular basket of goods representing daily necessities. So in practice, every Monday morning, most people promise a week’s labor to their guild, get paid in credits, and then have two weeks to spend all those credits.

If someone pays you in a Haven’s credits, you need to spend it pretty soon, and in that particular Haven; if you spend it on basics like food, toilet paper, rent, and so on, the prices will look pretty similar to nuyen, because that’s how they calibrate their credits. You can trade credits from one Haven for credits in another, as there’s plenty of trade over the Matrix between them, but it’s rare that you’ll wind up with them being more valuable than in the original Haven. Paradise Lake credits have to be converted to Beaver Lake credits to be spent there, even though they’re both in the Redmond Barrens, but you don’t lose much going to Puyallup or the Ork Underground. There’s automated arbitrage that will let you do it all the way to the GeMiTo Havens in Italy if you want to.

Financial instruments are banned there, even ones as simple as interest-bearing loans. Debt is considered synonymous with slavery.

Since credits expire, it is impossible to save for the future with them. People can prepare for emergencies by paying for insurance, and insurers can pay reinsurers, but this only goes so far if there’s a catastrophe that will cause numerous payouts; Haven reinsurers are primarily disaster recovery organizations. One of the major ways of saving for retirement is investing in local businesses.

Because it is impossible to sit on a large pile of credits, this means that there is huge demand for opportunities for capital investment, and the Havens are full of entrepreneurs making the case that they can create a business that will thrive and pay dividends. The wealthiest people invest in the local schools just to have an early chance at young talents that might be a good bet.

The other way to save for the future is the gift economy. Currency expires, but unless you choose to completely anonymize it, the record of charity given and received persists forever. Chits of gifts given are logged with their credit value at the time, and this total is tracked as your gift cred. Then when someone gives you a gift, that cancels your outstanding gift cred and gets logged to prestige.

People with credits left over at the end of a week will usually do something rather than let them expire, and while there are many feasts and parties that occur the night before a batch of credits evaporates, many other folks will contribute to food, rent, and medicine for the less fortunate, knowing that the gift cred might come in handy later. You can give directly as a person-to-person gift, or give to a charitable organization that then helps people. It’s effectively a social insurance program built into the very nature of the economic system.

Restaurants gain gift cred by giving away food that would otherwise spoil, street docs gain it by helping people who can’t otherwise afford their services, artists gain it every time people access their work (reading a book, listening to a piece of music, etc.), and engineers who work on Haven code gain it every time people use the libraries they write. A cheap WristScape loaded with Haven apps is often the first gift received by a squatter joining the Haven, and that usually gets them started on a path of reliable food and places to stay in exchange for doing odd jobs.

There is a mechanism for acclaim as well: if someone does something for you that you consider a gift, but they don’t, you can create a gift chit and ask them to ack it, and put value on it based on your own time. This chit can be passed around to others who can also ack it, resulting in a single gift chit that has huge value. The traditional ones are (wo)man of the hour (for people who did something spectacular, for which everyone affected would happily do an hour’s work in thanks) and hero of the day (for something amazing, where everyone is chipping in a day’s work). It’s rude not to accept a high value gift chit.

Havens can trade with each other; usually in services that can be performed over the Matrix, though sometimes in physical goods as well. Credits issued in one Haven need to be converted into those issued in another. Credits issued in the Paradise Lake Haven in Redmond don’t lose much when being converted into Ork Underground credits, because the expense of moving physical goods between the two places is reasonable. Converting credits between Paradise Lake and the Havens in Milan falls off a lot faster, because shipping to Italy is much more expensive — particularly since you have to buy hard currency like nuyen if you want to use non-Haven shipping networks, and nuyen only trickles into the Havens from outside.

Salutations to ██████ ██████. Your ██████, ██████, commissioned me to bring my experience from the worlds of finance and deniable operations to an evaluation of the Havens: are they what they seem? Are they viable in the long term? Do they present an opportunity for your syndicate? And do they present a threat?

I visited the Redmond Havens (Paradise Lake and Glow City), the Ork Underground (which has quietly adopted the system), and the Puyallup one (Carbonado), and contacted a number of other ones over the Matrix. The movement is spreading in Z-Zones, free cities, and pirate havens around the world, so you may wish to share this information with your peers.

The Haven Project started out in the wake of the Crash of ’29, when a group of people did a root cause analysis and declared that the problem is that all the incentives for modern civilization optimize for short-term profit over long-term resilience. The software exploits that made the Crash Worm possible only existed because developers were ignoring security to get features out before the competition. So they decided to invent— this is not a joke— an entire alternative civilization.

That alternative includes an economy (including its own currency), a technology (which emphasizes recycling and local production over comparative advantage and trade in physical goods), and a culture (which emphasizes the values that keep the other two working). There are some parallels with your own syndicate in that it has roots in providing for a disadvantaged minority, though your syndicate’s cohesion came from common origin in ██████, while the Havenly (as they call themselves) are mostly people who have been left behind by the rest of the world. The first Haven, in Redmond, broke ground in ’36; they took in a lot of refugees in the wake of the Night of Rage, and have built their identity around being the place that takes people in.

What you need to know about the economy is that if you get paid in Haven cred, you can only spend it in that Haven, and only on goods produced or services provided there, and fast, because it expires in two weeks. Because they share all their designs over the Matrix, you can buy pretty much anything that any Haven can produce. If you convert it to cred from some other Haven, you’ll take a loss. I have an appendix to this document explaining it in detail, for any of your personnel who need the specifics. You can easily buy Haven cred with hard currency; there’s always demand for goods from the Mess (as they call the outside world). If you need to use up Haven cred before it expires, you can either give it to charity (they keep track of that and you’ll look good), or buy something they’re good at (like coffee beans or fresh fruit).

The technology is built around recycling and automated manufacturing, with everything from 3-D printers to specialized robots. They have a lot of vertical farms and vats producing everything from food to printing feedstock. Their tech is generally generations behind the state of the art; no one would pay nuyen for it, but it beats dumpster diving. In some areas, this produces a higher standard of living than outside— everyone drinks real coffee, for instance, because when there’s more demand for it, they just build more vertical farms and grow more coffee beans. People wear cotton and wool and silk because their biotech people have been able to graft genes from silkworms and cashmere goats into cotton plants, and their clothing is all tailored because everyone gets it cranked out from sewbots instead of buying off the rack. Mass production in standard sizes would be cheaper, but their communities are too small for that to be a big advantage, and they don’t have to compete with international retail chains. If your suppliers in ██████ try to jack up prices on ████ for you, you could easily use standard Haven technology to crank out your own vertical farms and start growing the plants in Seattle. It wouldn’t cost much to pay for your own personnel to spend time in a Haven getting trained on the tech.

They have invested a great deal of effort in making their underlying economic system secure; I could go into detail, but because math is a sufficient summary as to why you shouldn’t waste the time of your deckers attempting to hijack Haven infrastructure.

The culture is why you don’t have to worry about the Havens competing in that market. Their first law— they call it a Principle because of all the anarchists, but it’s essentially a law— is minimize coercion, and that includes everything from not polluting the land, water, air, or astral space to not inviting trouble from outside. They know perfectly well that if anyone in a Haven tried breaking into the ███████ market, the syndicates would have an incentive to attack them, so anything they produce is for their own consumption. The only thing remotely close to your markets are the artisanal batches of original-recipe Coca-Cola.

That culture is also why you won’t find many opportunities to grow your business there. They consider debt to be a form of slavery and have explicit support for charity, so loansharking is not a good start there. One of their societal goals is that all people should live comfortably, without the kind of competitive pressure that creates demand for performance drugs in the day and party drugs at night, so there isn’t a lot of market there. Low-stakes gambling is common, but the concentrations of wealth for high-stakes gambling don’t even exist, and anyone with a gambling habit would receive considerable social pressure to seek treatment. Anything that makes people feel miserable creates an unpleasant astral background count and is considered pollution, so you couldn’t conduct any business where anyone is forced to do something through blackmail, addiction, or desperation.

Their justice system is focused on restoration and rehabilitation, not punishment. If they miraculously took over the world overnight, you and I would both be required to see therapists and get job retraining, and perhaps wear personal locators to make sure we didn’t cross paths with certain people, but we wouldn’t be in prison. It’s only with the incorrigibles that they get creative. I strongly recommend you not conduct operations in a Haven that would lead to any of your people being considered incorrigible. While some Havens have old-fashioned solutions (double tap to the back of the head is an option in the Ork Underground) and some new variations (permanently jacked into a gaming rig and your body exercised through a puppet implant is an option in Redding), there are some that are downright eerie— the prospect of spending years transformed into a golden retriever by a Dog shaman, or having my soul kicked through an astral gateway into the metaplanes by a Free Guidance Spirit giving me a quest, makes the prospect of a Lone Star chain gang sound positively pleasant.

Havens usually start by co-opting local gangs: Paradise Lake found it easy to bring in the Crimson Crush because the Crush were already big in community protection and they have no problem being paid in Haven cred that they could then use to buy Haven-produced food and medicine to help their people on the fringe of the Barrens. The Rusted Stilettos insist that they only allowed Glow City to become a Haven because the gang insisted that all the buildings had to look like they belonged on heavy metal album covers, but I suspect it was more practical considerations over medical aid. They don’t rely solely on gangs, though: Havens have both Rescuers, who are trained for the emergency response parts of the jobs of police, firefighters, and paramedics, and Defenders, who are often ex-military or trained to military standards. Gangs that try to make trouble in Havens either perish or have a sudden change in leadership. They lack the resources to take on a serious syndicate or megacorporation; their stated defensive policy is summed up in make them pay. Their goal is to make the cost of conquest much, much higher than the value of victory.

The main risk they pose to your syndicate is talent drain: people who would prefer to live in a Haven will take all their expertise there. This could also be seen as an advantage: people who chafe under your system will leave for what they see as greener pastures and avoid stirring up trouble in the ranks. If the Havens somehow take over the world, they could drive you out of business entirely, but this is an absurdly low probability; they haven’t even taken over the Redmond Barrens. They do a good job at bringing in certain personality types, but are extremely uncomfortable for authoritarian personalities who would prefer to be in a syndicate, gang, or corporation with clearly defined roles and a strong leader. That’s easily a third of the population even in good times, and more when people are feeling threatened, which is pretty much all the time these days.

They provide possible opportunities as well: Havens are very comfortable places for people to spend time without leaving a data trail visible to most deckers. While their ideal is that everyone shares the plans for goods that anyone can re-create, that doesn’t work for anything magical, or any physical piece of art. They may be customers for your smugglers when those goods would be inconvenient to ship through other means.

Regarding the approach they made to you, I believe you can take it at face value. I suspect the gifts were an advertisement for things they can produce that your syndicate might buy, but they cannot sell openly due to market regulations, and they always have a need for hard currency. I can discern no hidden traps in the favor they asked of you. They don’t want a war with any syndicate, and if you tell them someone is using them as cover for trying to interfere with your business, they will certainly investigate. If the perpetrator is a well-established citizen, they’ll want to take care of the problem in their own way; if they’re newly arrived, the Havenly may be angry enough to deliver them to you wrapped up with a bow.

In summary, they pose a negligible threat to an organization with your resources, and you may find some modest advantage from dealing with them.

Sincerely,

The Chromed Accountant

Haven Principles tl;dr

[Revision 5.04, 2048-11-18]

The Havens have principles, which are high-level goals; best practices, which are the currently accepted wisdom about how to implement those principles; and case studies, which are detailed examples for people to follow.

A lot of Havens are run by neo-anarchists, and a lot more are run by Native American tribes, and a lot more are run by people who have opinions on how people should govern themselves. The Havens are a system for running a community, designed to make some things easy and other things difficult, but they aren’t a code of laws. It’s up to each Haven to implement the principles in the way that works for their culture:

1. Minimize coercion. Let your neighbors be who they are, say what they want, worship however they wish, so they’ll do the same for you. Don’t make it worthwhile, or easy, for the governments and megacorps and syndicates to come after us. No matter how much love we share for the environment, Green Cell terrorists can expect no welcome in a Haven.
2. Maximize community. For the Haven, this mostly means a lot of stuff about building codes and organizing people. For you, it means pay attention when the Aunties talk with you.
3. People are people. Panhumans are people. Sasquatches are people. Naga are people. Centaurs are people. Shapeshifters are people. Free Spirits are people. For the Haven, this means there’s work in making sure all the infrastructure works for everyone. For you, this means respect your neighbors.
4. Resilience is more important than efficiency. If you build stuff, this means doing it right. In Seattle, build buildings for a 9.0 earthquake. In the Carib League, build buildings for a Category 5 hurricane. If you build tech, take the time to do it right; move fast and break things is for megacorporations, not Havens.
5. Keep it real. Private citizens can keep all the secrets they want; anything public is transparent by default and needs a court order to have secrecy. Journalists can’t be forced to give up a source. Courts have an advocate for the truth, as well as for the prosecution and defense. Governing is in plain language. Prices must always reflect actual costs, without hiding any externalities, which means trade with the Mess is seldom ethical given the lack of transparency.
6. Natural monopolies belong to the people. Water, sewer, power, data, and all that are government jobs. Land is owned by the government and leased out.
7. We hold the world in trust for the next generation. Havens provide universal education as best they can. Share your knowledge, and give credit to the people whose ideas you use. If you make stuff, use cradle-to-cradle design.
8. Own your failures and learn from them. A postmortem is the most important restitution for an honest mistake. If you were negligent, or ignored best practices, you can expect to pay material restitution.
9. Welcome newcomers. When we get more people, make room for them; build more infrastructure and train more people as necessary.

If you have to violate a best practice because the principle is more important, and you know what you’re doing, then do the right thing and go update the best practices later.

Coercion doesn’t just mean forcing people to do stuff; it also means forcing things on other people. Don’t do drek that pollutes the land, the water, the air, or the astral plane, like creating pollution or running sweatshop labor or breeding antibiotic resistance into bacteria. Don’t incite other people to do drek, either; we love free speech but have no patience for stochastic terrorism. Any attempt, no matter how polite, to deny personhood to any class of person is considered incitement to violence. We’ve seen that drek before and we know where it leads. Once someone starts spouting Humanis or Sons of Sauron drek, we don’t wait for them to assemble in large groups and put on hoods. And don’t use Havens as a base for making trouble for other people. Green Cell terrorists may use Haven tech, but they don’t follow Haven principles.

Grow hydroponic coca or poppies if you want to make artisanal batches of original recipe Coca-Cola or drugs for pain management for someone who’s allergic to the stuff that comes out of the bioreactors, but don’t scale it up and sell it to the Mess and bring Lone Star or Knight Errant down on our heads. Same for anything that violates patents and trademarks.

If people need shelter, we fab more buildings. If people need food, we fab more vertical farms. If people need medical care, we fab more vat labs and train more doctors and nurses and medtechs. When the corporations eat themselves, we’ll be there to take people in.

The Audubon Field Guide to Haven Peacekeepers

Out in the Mess, the rules are all backed by violence. You break one of thousands of rules and goons from Lone Star or Knight Errant show up and, if you don’t have enough money, can beat you to a pulp on a whim, then throw you in jail, seize everything you own, hold a trial, and sell you off to a prison that will extract as much value from your labor as they can. We don’t do that here. No asset forfeiture, no torture, no jails, no slavery. The nature of any laws is up to the government chosen by the people of the Haven, but the Haven architects do a lot of work to support minimize coercion. That means not forcing drek on other people.

We have four groups dedicated to keeping the peace:

• Balancers prevent problems in the future.
• Rescuers deal with emergencies in the present.
• Investigators seek to understand problems in the past.
• Defenders protect the Haven from outside threats.

Balancers— the Aunties

We’re big on solving problems before they need coercion to solve them. We like freedom, and understand that sometimes people need a little help keeping up the matching responsibility. So we have this program called Serendipity that tries to understand as much about your needs as you’re willing to share, and it makes sure to send a Balancer around to chat with you every so often to help you stay connected to the community and get back on balance if you’re a little off your feet. Balancers have no direct power. If you share enough info with Serendipity, you’ll get a little ping when it knows you’re doing something that could use a little help, and if you accept, a Balancer will turn up to help out and have a chat while you’re getting things done, or even help you make and eat dinner if you let Serendipity know that’s welcome. Other times, or if you don’t trust your chore list with Serendipity’s security tech, they’ll meet up with you for coffee or something stronger. In Havens with a lot of Asian cultural influence, they instantly got called Auntie or Uncle, and now everyone calls them the Aunties.

Aunties are expected to use their judgment to override Serendipity and give it training feedback; understanding people is a job for people, not computers. They’re generally unarmed, though a fair number of them can put you in a joint lock if you start something. They’re super-social folks who talk to people, organize parties and book clubs and game nights, talk people down when they’re wound up, and offer advice that helps you avoid misery and remove obstacles to happiness. They’re there to hear you grouse and vent and brag and rant and then hook you up with connections who can make your life better, anything from parenting support to business advice to helping shoulder your load for a little while until you aren’t under pressure and can start helping others. If you think someone ought to talk to that person about a problem, call an Auntie.

If your social network is too insular, they’ll introduce you to folks outside it. If you have a sudden interest in something dangerous, they’ll introduce you to responsible, dangerous people who will peer-pressure you into being responsible like them. If you ignore them and go down a path to being a menace to your neighbors, they can talk to other people and make your life so difficult that it’s easier to leave the Haven. If they keep files at all, they’re private; this is not a Social Credit System! If they tell you to take an anger management class or take your dog to obedience training, do it; it’ll make your life better in the long run. Domestic violence is an early warning of mass violence, so if you can’t learn to control yourself, people are going to get very concerned.

Aunties get called in as soon as it looks like someone needs talking down. They usually have a budget for giving out Haven-wide gift cred to enlist bystanders to help out; if an Auntie asks a couple of people in a bar to see a drunk guy home safely, the cred is usually good for another evening out.

And finally, when people start talking about mutual aid during a crisis, Aunties help organize it: introducing people to each other, recruiting experts, setting up rotations so no one burns out.

Rescuers

Rescuers are trained as firefighters, paramedics, and minimally lethal combat. They show up to deal with things that are going wrong right now. They’re trained in de-escalation, but when that fails, they also trained in martial arts like judo and aikido and have access to an arsenal of less-lethal gear like narcoject pistols and rifles, gloop guns, net guns, bola guns, tasers, tangler grenades, SodOffs with baton rounds or rubber shot, telescoping batons, and so on. Rescuers get called in as soon as it looks like someone is going to need to intervene physically. If someone is reeling drunk, they call an Auntie to talk them down; if someone is reeling drunk and waving a gun, they call an Auntie and a Rescuer who can step in if needed. They usually wear white outfits that provide light body armor.

Investigators

Investigators are a lot like police detectives, but their job is only figuring things out; they usually have a Rescuer along if they think someone is going to give them trouble. Some Havens simply post a bounty of gift cred (spread over the entire Haven, just like they charge for infrastructure) for figuring out who caused a problem, and then another one for someone to check their work.

Defenders

Havens do come under attack from outside, and Defenders are there to discourage that. In an urban Haven, they’re usually the local gang being paid to provide protection, or sometimes a crime syndicate. In others, they’re often military veterans. Haven Defenders can go toe-to-toe with gangs and bandits, but they know perfectly well that they’re not in the same class as megacorporate military forces, so they specialize in dirty tricks and attrition, driving up the budgetary cost of assaulting a Haven to the point that the bean-counters will decide it isn’t worth it.

Defenders wear hard armor and have the best toys the Haven can fab. They have lots of agents that can foul jet intakes and air filters, heavy-duty bolas that can foul propellers, aerosols that deposit a filth-attracting coating of grease on everything from goggles to windscreens, solvents that eat the rubber seals on vehicles, caltrops and little bots that scatter them.

Flexible Response

Flexible Response teams handle weird, unexpected stuff. It’s usually a part-time job, with most of the team members being Balancers, Rescuers, Investigators, or Defenders as their main work. The goal of Flexible Response is to solve problems, understand problems, and create doctrine for them to dealt with as a routine matter.

Justice

When Investigators report, Havens choose what to do with the information; some let the wronged person decide between punishments, some have someone independent decide, but it usually comes down to restitution, exile, or a therapy ward. There are a few Havens— monasteries, mostly— that accept exiles who want to atone for having done something bad, and people that voluntarily spend a long time there can be accepted back in the rest of Haven society. Therapy wards are similarly rare, but receive sponsorship from other Havens.

Punishment for crimes is up to whatever government the people of the Haven choose. Prisons are discouraged because locking people away from society isn’t a good way to make them fit for society; anyone can voluntarily take on a restitution goal where they make a goal of accumulating gift cred doing odd jobs for the community. The bigger a goal you take, the higher a percentage of the Haven you need to work for, directly, in order to meet it, so you can’t earn it all by helping people in a small clique. If someone is facing exile, they can offer some time of monitoring and amount of community restitution. If you see someone wearing matching black bracelets, they’re trying to earn their way back into the good graces of the community by gathering gift cred from a big cross-section of the Haven population.

The Neighborhood

Havens are usually built out of the wreckage of cities and towns that have been abandoned by the Mess: property prices went down, property taxes went down, infrastructure and services went to hell, and Lone Star gave it a security E rating and left it to the squatters. Sometimes we renovate old buildings, but more often we knock them down and replace them from scratch with ones that have enough headroom for our troll citizens.

Any Haven neighborhood is going to have:

• A chowspace at most a block away from every home. They have implements for cooking and places to sit and eat it, and usually an area for kids to play and a big screen for anything from entertainment to conferencing. If you love to cook for other people, you get priority for living near a chowspace.
• A junkspace at most a block away from every home. At the very least, these have a compost pile and sorting bins for things that need more help to be broken down into feedstock. They usually have a plastics digester, and the big ones can re-smelt metals and grind ceramics to powder. They manufacture a lot of biodiesel and heating oil.
• A waterspace within three blocks. Water treatment, public baths, saunas, laundromats, sometimes even swimming pools and water slides. Usually built under a water tower or over a cistern that can provide during the next dry season, and adjacent to a junkspace. If the water table is deep enough, some Havens will build stepwells.
• A makerspace within three blocks. These have the tools for creating new things and repairing old ones. At the very least, they’ll have a collection of hand tools with tracking beacons to help them get back home; usually, there are 3-D printers and autolathes and sewbots. There are loads of augmented reality assistance programs to help you run the fabbers, or you can offer some cred to the nearest available adolescent.
• An infospace within three blocks. These have infrastructure for doing information technology work. Lots of desks and screens and movable sound-absorbing partitions. And local copies of all the information that belongs in a library; they usually accumulate a supply of physical books over time.

In downtown areas, we build multi-story with residences above businesses. Outside that, you get a mix of renovated single-family detached houses or condoplexes, old-style boarding houses, and new-style multifamily homes that can accommodate a few generations of one family or a group of friends.

There are parks, but they usually do double duty as farms; it’s rare to have trees that don’t bear fruit.

Farming

Even in urban zones, we have farming. We don’t often have soil to till; mostly we have vertical farm style buildings that use insect-fed aquaculture to crank out food (mostly plants, a little shrimp and fish), textile fibers, and cellulose feedstock. Most roofs are covered in something productive: solar panels (which sell their energy on the local grid), or greenhouses, or beehives, or genetically engineered vines that are cranking out glucose squash, flour melons, cashmere bolls, dairy gourds, burgerfruit, cocoa or coffee beans, or just fruit that normally grows on trees, or an old-style maze of transparent pipes circulating tailored algae that gets processed into flour, or feeding the bacteria vats and bioreactors that produce egg and milk proteins and cooking oil and leather. Genetweaked trees grow the same stuff.

People also keep livestock: chickens, pigs, goats, and angora rabbits. Some Havens raise fish in their ponds, cisterns, and reservoirs when there isn’t a drought. Real eggs and meat cost a lot more than the equivalent from a bioreactor, as you’d expect.

There’s also the Haven data infrastructure. There are standardized plans for server bricks that you can buy and plug into your local power and data grids, and let other people store data on them and use processing time, usually on the Scatterweb. The infrastructure code of the Haven economy relies on there being hundreds or thousands of these scattered throughout every Haven. Usually you buy one, or a stack of them, give the keys to one of the local admins, and just keep it dust-free, and the cred trickles in.

The server bricks spend a fair amount of time running distributed ledger operations for Havens; mostly local ones, but you can wind up helping validate transactions on another continent. There are also lots of small-scale local data services, running stripped-down Matrix protocols that are just enough to read books, listen to music, watch trideo, that kind of thing. When you store data in the scatterweb, it’s encrypted and scattered redundantly to server bricks all over the planet; once it’s in there, the only way to silence it is to shut up the person with the encryption keys, and if it was openly published, forget it.

The server bricks are likely sitting next to big banks of ultracapacitors— more bricks— that charged up when electricity was cheap (like when the sun is out and the wind is blowing) and sell it when it’s dear. If you can afford server and power bricks, get some and contribute to your Haven. And they make wonderful housewarming gifts.

Finally, we farm data itself. Get some sensors and deploy them and pick the rules by which people can get the data. If it’s atmospheric temperature and barometric pressure and soil humidity, give it away. If it’s a recorded camera feed out your windows, lock it down until someone asks you for access because they’re trying to figure out who wronged someone else so the wrong fragger doesn’t get punished.

Infrastructure

People are maintaining the local power, water, sewage, and data grids in Havens. The folks with the talent and organization to get them going are very popular, and there are a variety of crews who travel around doing the work. The best teams have a hermetic mage with an earth elemental doing excavation (and a fire elemental to work on the clay pipes that the earth elemental is creating on-site), a shaman with a city spirit who can point out the best places to build things and prevent accidents, and some experienced planners, plumbers, and electricians who can do the setup. In their wake they leave water cisterns, storm drains, sewer lines, cable conduits, and a whole lot of happy people.

If you have these kinds of talents, volunteer to join one of the traveling crews, or to help maintain the local ones. Shamans who can ask city spirits to diagnose clogged drainpipes or even dislodge a clog can earn cred quickly. And if a pump has broken down, people will pay for water elemental services to pump from an underground cistern into a gravity-feed one.

When there’s a lot of excavation involved, they turn the tailings into bricks, and construction work ensues. If you know how to trowel mortar, or want to learn, creating new buildings is very satisfying work. Less satisfying is building defensive fortifications when your Haven is trying to carve a pocket of safety from violent anarchy. Look up more details of making concrete, mortar, asphalt, and alternative ways of creating paved roads.

Manufacturing

We don’t really go for twentieth-century things like factories with assembly lines. Our manufacturing tends to be using 3-D printers cranking out individual parts that are then assembled by skilled humans and the occasional dedicated robot, sewbots cranking out clothing made from locally grown materials, that sort of thing. (Humanoid robots are more maintenance trouble than they’re worth right now.) The open source physical design library keeps growing. Some of the designs even creep into the Mess because our stuff conforms to the Maker’s Bill of Rights and you can’t maintain the half the stuff coming out of megacorps without paying licensing fees.

We also have plenty of brewing and distillation going on. There are a lot of beers and some fairly nice vodkas. Some glucose squash are made using agave genes and those get made into pulque and distilled into tequila.

One thing we don’t yet source well is advanced electronics. A couple of 3-D printers working in metal and plastic can easily crank out the parts for an AK-47 assault rifle, but if you want a knockoff Ingram Smartgun with wireless Matrix integration and a smartlink, you’re going to have to scavenge the parts from a broken gun or get the raw stuff from the hard-currency economy. At some point, the boffins working on self-assembling materials and nanoprinters are going to announce that we can start cranking out our own chips and cyberware, but right now you have to buy things from the megacorps and then overwrite the code with something you can trust.

The thing that 3-D printers need is feedstock: extremely pure powders of metal and plastic and cellulose and whatnot that they can use to build all those parts. (Some Havens even have 3-D printers that can print buildings, out of concrete or even mud.)

We do have recycling efforts to create those from existing waste, so don’t throw things in the corporate dumps and sewers if you can avoid it. These days, they’re all highly secured reprocessing facilities that extract rare earths from electronics and phosphorus from urine. We do a lot of surreptitious mining from old 20th century landfills; at some point, the megacorps are get out of the resource-extraction mindset and they’ll stake claims on all the old garbage dumps.

We also don’t have a whole lot of industrial chemical synthesis or fancy multilayer manufacturing yet; only the biggest Havens can set up that kind of infrastructure.

Services

If you came here from the corporate world, you may have skills that are valuable here in the Haven. If not, you can learn them here. The standard in the Mess is 996 for wageslaves and 40 hours per week (with as much overtime as they can get away with) for people with expertise. We’re nowhere near a leisure world where everything is supplied by robots, but we have enough automation that most folks can put in a 20 hour week doing something critical to keep the Haven running and another 20 on child care, teaching, art, hobbies, research, or helping out on a swarm project like putting together new buildings.

There are a lot of jobs critical to keeping a Haven running. You need at least half a dozen people just to run a sundries lab that can crank out soap, shampoo, deodorant, shave gel, hair gel, hand lotion, and so on. The minimum number of people to manufacture the core goods to keep a Haven running is about a thousand, plus hundreds more running the infrastructure. You won’t find a Haven under 5000 people that cranks out graphene microprocessors, or under 10000 that makes neural-dust cyberware.

The discipline to keep bioreactors and vats running clean is not common, and the tailored algae and bacteria crank out a lot of raw ingredients that feed people. If you have better-than-neurotypical powers of concentration, almost any vat shop will be happy to take you on as an apprentice even if you have no training at all.

If you have a green thumb, we grow stuff everywhere, mostly in the vertical farms; food, fiber for clothing, anything the genetweakers can grow in a vine or bush or tree that helps us be self-sufficient. Likewise beekeeping. We have a lot of plants and can keep a lot of hives busy.

Even an entry-level system administrator can help keep Haven data services running.

If you were a health care worker, your local street doc may have work for you. Or the flophouse next to her shop where people recover. Your local street doc’s closest connection to a medical school may be the training of the doc to whom they apprenticed and the pirate textbooks they reference. Medicine here doesn’t look like hospitals outside because we’re constantly training people; expect that any time you see a doctor or nurse, they have an apprentice or two along, and maybe a journeyman getting hands-on experience if it’s something routine. If you need a specialist, you may need to consult via the Matrix with someone on another continent, if the expert systems assisting a local doctor can’t figure it out.

Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and painters are in demand, though you may have to apprentice yourself to another one to learn all the tricks to making do when you can’t just pop down to the hardware store to buy new fittings with hard currency.

If you were good at babysitting when you were a teenager, there’s plenty of work like that, though you’ll have to help out at a nursery for a while to develop enough reputation that people will trust you with kids on your own.

And if you can teach, that’s excellent. There’s a good network of Montessori schools in the Havens, which go all the way to the time they’re ready for apprenticeships and MOOCs and OpenCourseWare. We contribute a lot to Orkwork, designing advanced apprenticeship programs for training up orks, who are adult at twelve years old. And yes, you can teach part time and do blue sky research part time.

If you were in law enforcement, be very careful about who you admit it to. Most people have experience of the folks who enforce the laws that only apply to the poor while the rich get away with anything they want. Our best cops are the ones who look like they’re auditioning for Motorcyclist of the Apocalypse and know how to talk someone down from a killing fury.

A lot of keeping the peace is talking people down who are getting cranky with each other, and that means negotiating skill. We don’t have much in the way of legal codes to argue, but we have a lot of people who need help coming to a fair resolution in disputes.

Art is one of our biggest sources of hard currency. That stuff sells on Etsy and other forums all across the planet. Your local gang may hire you to spraypaint classy gang tags to mark their territory, local homes and businesses may appreciate a good mural, and while you may have to start out helping someone else execute their designs, they’ll give you a leg up on making your own pretty soon.

If you’re a specialist in something very technical like industrial chemistry or nanofabrication, talk to Haven crew. Some Havens may be happy to sponsor you to come apply your talents to their supply chain; there are some things we can’t yet crank out with self-assembling materials, synthetic biology, and gengineered plants.

We don’t have casinos here, ’cos they’re all about inducing addiction, fleecing the little people, and laundering money. Ask around if you want a friendly game of low-stakes poker; those aren’t hard to find.

Transit

There are lots of variants on the bicycle, particularly the pedicab. Most vehicles are bodged together from a mix of scavenged parts and freshly printed open source designs. Used cooking oil from restaurants gets processed into biodiesel and sold to the people who refurbished ancient diesel cars or have more modern multifuel ones, and there are plenty of drivers who will be happy to take you all the way from one end of your region to the other for reasonable amounts of cred from either Haven; just load the Unicorn Express app on your Scape and they’ll courier anything from packages to people. Lots of Havens have a bike share.

Sports

Major league sports in the UCAS are a scam, dating back to a US Supreme Court ruling that an exhibition of sport was exempt from monopoly-busting. The Havens are more like Europe: every neighborhood has a team, and teams play other ones nearby, and someday we may all be rich enough that we can have a Haven World Cup or something.

The most common sports are, in descending order: basketball, football (aka soccer), and baseball or cricket (depending on the local culture). Most of the players have day jobs.

Magic

Like everywhere else, in the Havens, magicians are rare and valuable, and the Havens go to great effort to make sure that they feel welcome there. For Hermetic mages, the Open Grimoire is available to everyone, even outside the Havens; for shamans, it doesn’t take much prestige at all to get access to the useful-and-not-dangerous spells like healing and repair. Anyone who can cast healing spells (or do that adept laying on of hands trick) has a bright future ahead of them. A team of elementals can accomplish a whole lot of infrastructure work faster than digbots.

Talk to your local magician about magical opportunities in your own Haven.

Running Civilization

The problem with building a nice Haven is making sure that it stays that way. If things seem too peaceable in a Haven on the edge of civilization, corporate skags will start to get ideas about moving in, and then they start investigating the deeds to property that was long abandoned and paying for chromed-up hulks with guns to evict folks, and there goes the neighborhood.

Now, if someone wanders in from the nice part of town without getting mugged along the way and starts buying stuff in nuyen, make sure someone explains the Haven thing to them and get them to buy in. There’s nothing wrong with having someone who has a hard-currency job living in a Haven, but they have to know how important it is to invest in the neighborhood instead of the stock market. And if they don’t get it, if they think that money is power and might makes right, do your best to make sure they don’t want to come down here even in an armored limo.

We don’t want a showdown with the megacorps and the governments, because we’ll lose. They’ll outlaw our currency and mine every bit of value they can get out of us. They play their power games, wreck stuff, and we step in and pick up the pieces. One day our tech will be so good, they’ll be obsolete, and they’ll just fade away. Meanwhile, we need to keep our heads down.

Recruiting

The megacorps prefer to keep Havens out of the news entirely; when they do come up, they’re portrayed as primitive communist hellholes where no one is allowed to accumulate a life’s savings, and the most dangerous-looking orks and trolls get all the camera time, with a few naga thrown in to creep out the ophidophobes.

The Haven principle of keeping a z-zone around you cuts down on tourism. People do not go into the Redmond or Puyallup Barrens on a lark, and an invitation to come on down, never mind the go-gangs, is generally scoffed at as a transparent ploy for a mugging or worse.

But Havens need to recruit people with good training and education, so they have scouts who go out into the Mess looking for likely prospects. Some of them bear greetings to people who already have kinfolk and old friends in the Havens, ready to set up video conferences to persuade people to take the risk of visiting. Others look for folks who are getting close to the what do I have to lose? point: folks who are in debt up to their eyeballs, out-of-work veterans, cops who got fired for putting serve and protect ahead of the corp and their colleagues. Some Havens specialize in treating PTSD, drug addiction, and other problems caused by the dysfunction in the Mess, getting people into an environment without the underlying fear that runs the Mess and where they can get the treatment they need.

Occasionally, they find someone whose debt can be purchased at a fraction of its value. Instead of a bounty hunter showing up, a Haven scout does so, tells them they’ve gotten a personal jubilee, and then plays on the gratitude to convince them to visit a Haven, find out what it’s like there, and then tell all their family and friends. It’s rare for that kind of debt to be available for people with heavy-duty skills (doctors, full magicians, top notch researchers with expensive headware) because coercing them is so valuable, but there are plenty of folks who are still reasonably talented who end up getting fragged over by the system.

Pirates and smugglers, and even normal merchant traffic who are in the know, sometimes rescue people and drop them off at island and coastal Havens in exchange for reprovisioning.

Haven Gear

The goal of the Haven project is to have a complete backup civilization ready when the Mess implodes. Haven gear tends to be made of things that are available without massive resource extraction: abundant elements, gathered by growing plants or recycled from already-mined materials. The designs follow a cradle-to-cradle design philosophy, with everything built to eventually be broken down for reuse. This means lots of cellulose, ceramics, digestible plastics. Electronics tends to rely on graphene and carbon nanotubes for everything from conducting electricity to energy storage in ultracapacitors, because most of the metal in Havens got recycled from the Mess; we save metal and rare earths for things like the magnets in motors. Some designs really do demand real metal, but it’s easiest to make things for dirt cheap if you can make the feedstock from air and dirt.

High-tech fabrics are pretty rare, so the Havenly don’t have glowpanels and flexscreens on their clothing, or smartweaves that tighten the weave when it’s cold. They do have an abundance of cotton, silk, cashmere, and engineered spider-silk, and all manner of dyes, thanks to the gene splicers. With autolooms and dye printers and sewbots, Haven fashion can be very colorful.

Parks usually have clean air coming from the nearest vertical farms to wash out the smog on bad days, but we can’t keep out pollution entirely. They fabbed up filter masks for kids that look like animal muzzles, and they even caught on with adults.

Electronics are currently far behind the state of the art, so infotech is extremely general and produced in bulk. You’ll find the same little slab of black glass controlling dishwashers, cars, and thermostats, with only a 2D screen. It’s all built to work through Carrington Event-level solar storms, though, and EMP from critters like thunderbirds at most causes it to reboot. The best Haven-tech cyberdeck costs a whole lot of cred, isn’t a whole lot better than a tortoise, and is best described as luggable.

Fabbers can only make stuff in a few materials each, and bots can do some assembly of the results, but they still need a person to get involved. For fancy stuff, you want to go to the pros, but for a lot of standard stuff, you can find a lot of adolescents hanging out in makerspaces ready to babysit the fabbers while they’re doing coursework, clearing jams and doing final assembly.

It’s standard for people fabbing popular sundries to create extra and leave them in the makerspace for the next person who needs them, for gift cred. The fabbers all default to private, but if you at least leave anonymous stats about what you designs you used, there are better odds someone else will have made the thing you need when you get there. It leads to a nice pay it forward practice.

With everything being fabbed, it’s easy to customize things to your own taste, so every Haven is a wild mix of styles. Most buildings have doors and ceiling sized for trolls, and prefer ramps to stairs for accessibility; when they do have stairs, they tend to be shallow enough for dwarfs and broad enough for sasquatches.

Culture

Time Management

This varies a lot from Haven to Haven, depending on the underlying culture from which they formed. Some value timeliness and have a culture of aim to show up just a little early and don’t create so much stress that people run late, and develop norms of a pleasant thing you do when some folks show up early. Others take a more relaxed attitude: if you’re worried about the trains running on time, you already have a problem.

Entertainment

Music

There is a lot of live music because the usual deal Havenly conjurers make with spirits involves art. Most bands publish both recordings and sheet music; while spirits can flit across the world if they really want to see a band perform, but spirits enjoy their laziness just as much as us incarnate folk and are happy to catch a local performance. Of course, each band puts their own spin on things, and often sends the recording back to the original creators, who sometimes riff on it in turn and lead to some wild collaborations.

Dance

With music comes dancing, and with dancing comes choreographed performances, and paying off spirits means there’s a lot more economic interest coming the way of performers than there would be for embodied artistic appetites alone.

Stage

Like music and dance, there is a lot of stage acting because of the demand for entertainment for spirits.

Simsense

The Havens do have simsense tech, but the most popular public use for it is recipe calibration: answering the question am I cooking this right? Producing simsense on a deadline without putting the actors through the wringer is really difficult, and a lot of Hollywood burnouts drift into Havens and act in stage or trideo.

Trideo

The Limuw Haven has a lot of Hollywood refugees and has become the Havens’ big trideo producer, but production can happen nearly anywhere thanks to green screens and rigger-controlled scenery drones. They make movies well as serials:

What’s on the trid?

Boldly Go	Far future science fiction. Has clear heritage in Star Trek and Farscape, with animatronic alien puppets controlled by riggers.
The Camelot Awakening	Reinterpreting Arthurian legend with a mini-Awakening in medieval Britain.
Sects and Violence	Wuxia fantasy adventure with excellent fight choreography. They invented the notion of Taoist Bronze as the magical material for artificial limbs, and the look is so popular that many people with Haven cyberlimbs use the style.
Wanderjahr	A group of young Havenly friends travel into the Mess and solve problems that the society ignores.
Under One Roof	A situation comedy with a large mixed-metatype extended family all living on one floor of an apartment building. (The genetics is actually plausible, though it would take a lot of coincidence to get those results.)
The Coyote Commandments	A stolid young man in the Kadoka Haven is visited by Coyote and, haltingly, learns the ways of the shaman. Comedy with moments of profundity.
Gods Like Us	Figures from a variety of pantheons across the world are incarnated in a Haven, find mundane jobs, and gradually rediscover the connection to their own divinity. Drama with moments of hilarity. Noteworthy for all-magical special effects. The team moves to a different Haven to film each season.
Santa Beach	The portly, white-bearded troll who likes to lounge on the beach on Wima is called Santa as a street name... but he meddles in the lives of Havenly and pirates, to good outcomes, and there are hints that he might actually be Santa Claus.

Literature

Books are treated like any other design you can fab: people chip in to sponsor authors and publishers just like they sponsor design teams, and it’s considered polite to send a little cred— charity or otherwise— the way of the creator when you print a book or read it on e-ink or listen to the audiobook.

Solidarity

Every Haven has their own culture, and some of them are wildly different. There are numerous forks of the best practices and case studies. What keeps them from diverging too far is that Havens offer each other mutual aid, because they know they might need it sometime— Defenders to protect against a threat that would affect a second Haven after a first fell, or disaster recovery. Cooler heads in each Haven argue for policies of let the other Havens do things their own way even if they’re wildly different from ours and keep rivalries friendly where they occur at all.

Haven kids all learn First They Came... in school.