While the hope is that the story of For­got­ten Chil­dren will explain all the tech­nol­ogy invented between now and the time it is set, this page sum­marises the tech­nolo­gies men­tioned thus far for any­one who for­gets while wait­ing for a new chapter!

Angels

An Advanced Neurally-Generated Ether Link, or ANGEL, is a microchip that sits along­side a person’s brain stem, aug­ment­ing their vision, hear­ing and short-term mem­ory. It is implanted sur­gi­cally, and var­i­ous sec­tions of its sur­face bond to neu­rons in the brain to allow it to com­mu­ni­cate with the visual cor­tex and other areas of the brain. It pow­ers itself using ambi­ent body heat.

Ini­tial uptake of the Angel devices was slow, as the pub­lic were under­stand­ably con­cerned about the pos­si­bil­ity of mal­func­tion. How­ever, due to exten­sive mar­ket­ing as a “Guardian Angel” and tie-ins to sys­tems and devices made by many cor­po­ra­tions, uptake increased steadily once it became appar­ent how much eas­ier life would be with one. They also became com­pul­sory in the military.

In adults, an Angel requires occa­sional recal­i­bra­tion to ensure that it is oper­at­ing cor­rectly, par­tic­u­larly its inter­face with the host’s vision which requires con­sid­er­able fine-tuning. In mod­ern times, Angels are implanted in babies along with their vac­ci­na­tion shots. Their inter­face with the brain mod­i­fies along with the brain itself as the child grows.

An Angel’s most sub­tle method of oper­a­tion is through read/write access to the host’s short-term mem­ory. Via this method, a per­son can think of a ques­tion and know the answer within mil­lisec­onds. An Angel can also pro­vide an over­lay on the host’s vision and hear­ing, allow­ing them to aug­ment their per­cep­tion of the world as desired.

The Angel chip itself is merely a dumb ter­mi­nal; all the pro­cess­ing is done by back-end servers. The Angels com­mu­ni­cate with them wire­lessly via relay units, and servers also com­mu­ni­cate with each other wire­lessly when within range. This allows ships to trans­fer their occu­pants’ Angel data between space stations.

The wire­less grid that facil­i­tates this is known as the Ether Net­work, often abbre­vi­ated to Ether, Angel Net­work, or just the Net.

Nanoma­chines

Nanoma­chines are tiny machines that are able to manip­u­late indi­vid­ual mol­e­cules. Each machine is specif­i­cally built and coded for an indi­vid­ual mol­e­cule. Vast groups of machines, known as colonies, can be directed en masse by pow­er­ful com­put­ers manip­u­lat­ing an elec­tro­mag­netic field in which the nanoma­chines float. This allows com­plex struc­tures — even liv­ing crea­tures — to be con­structed from and reduced to their base com­po­nents, pro­vided their exact mol­e­c­u­lar struc­ture is known and stored.

Nanoma­chines are suf­fi­ciently dan­ger­ous that their use is strictly con­trolled, and the required pro­cess­ing power puts their use beyond the means of the aver­age cit­i­zen any­way. On plan­e­tary habi­ta­tions and large space sta­tions such as Free City, it is still cheaper to pro­duce and recy­cle in the tra­di­tional man­ner. How­ever, nanoma­chines are used exten­sively in the Celes­tial Fleet’s waste repro­cess­ing systems.

Only the very rich can afford to per­son­ally own and use a nanoma­chine colony, tra­di­tion­ally tak­ing the form of a ‘maker’.

Human Genetic Engineering

Aboard the fixed sta­tions such as Free City, nat­ural preg­nancy is an option that is get­ting increas­ingly less com­mon. More usual is that the DNA of par­ents be sequenced, and an arti­fi­cial fer­tilised egg be cre­ated based on their wishes for which genes the child should carry. This may then be implanted back into the mother, or ges­tated in a lab. How­ever the preg­nancy occurs, reg­u­lar screen­ings for genetic defects are car­ried out, and defec­tive embryos are not allowed to come to term.

Aboard the Celes­tial Fleet, strict pop­u­la­tion con­trol ensures the sus­tain­abil­ity of the pas­sen­gers dur­ing what might be a jour­ney of thou­sands of years. Pas­sen­gers are ster­ile, and repro­duc­tion can only occur through lab-based com­bi­na­tion of DNA. All repro­duc­tion can only occur with the per­mis­sion of the Pop­u­la­tion Con­trol Committee.

Arti­fi­cial Gravity

Arti­fi­cial Grav­ity occurs in two forms, one of which con­sid­er­ably pre-dates the other. When mankind was build­ing its first large space sta­tions, such as Free City, grav­ity was intro­duced by cen­tripetal force — that is, the inhab­ited areas of the sta­tion rotate around a cen­tral axis so as to give the impres­sion of grav­ity to those in the rotat­ing ring, for whom the cen­tral spin­dle is ‘up’.

The down­side of this is that smaller sta­tions and ships are too small to use this method, and they remained zero-G envi­ron­ments until recently.

Start­ing a hun­dred or so years ago, a gene ther­apy was made avail­able on a vol­un­tary basis that ren­ders the body slightly fer­ro­mag­netic. Elec­tro­mag­netic field gen­er­a­tors were intro­duced on ships along­side this, the com­bi­na­tion mean­ing that the body could be made to feel ‘grav­ity’ in the direc­tion of the mag­nets. This treat­ment proved wildly suc­cess­ful, and hav­ing this gene ther­apy dur­ing child­hood is now nor­mal. The sen­sa­tion of not only being attracted to the floor but repelled by the ceil­ing too is reported to only feel weird for a few hours.

The Celes­tial Fleet use this method of apply­ing arti­fi­cial gravity.