Welcome to Wynérias! Please be prepared to present your authorization from the Executive Board and your corporate identification upon arrival at Port Sung. Access to all regions of the planet beyond Port Sung is clearance controlled. Be aware that Wynérias proper operates under the conlegial jurisdiction of Wynérias Development and Holdings, ICC. If you do not consent to this jurisdiction, please remain within the starport extrality area.
-- announcement on passenger shuttles landing at the downport
Also, bring your warm pants.
-- response to said announcement
Welcome, gentlesophs, to the Empire's other world of science, and one which is its opposite in many ways. Where Resplendent Exponential Vector is fire and ash, Wynérias is snow and ice. Where the Vector represents science unbound by the coquetries of practicality, Wynérias represents research yoked to practical ends. While the researchers of Asymptote are free to throw science at the wall to see what sticks, those of Wynérias labor under corporate contract towards specific, desired results.
And it is very cold.
Wynérias is not an ice planet, of course. We all know our galactography, and that there's no such thing as an ice planet. It's just a planet of mostly ice, glaciers sweeping far south from massive polar caps, at whose center carbon dioxide falls as snow in the thin atmosphere, to a small equatorial stripe where the temperature is only slightly below the freezing point of water.
This stripe is an equatorial girdle of, naturally enough, tundra. (It can be seen from orbit, a strip of pale green-speckled grey against the expanses of white; lichen, winter plants, and a few hardy trees.) Other native life includes the iceblooms, a family of blue-violet microorganisms which thrive within the upper layers of the planet's snow and ice, and a variety of small creatures with exoskeletons of a light, coral-like material, which use bony limbs to scrape up the iceblooms and "farm" them within their dorsal bladders, generating warmth and nutrition.
It became the world it is today in 4231, when development rights to the world were purchased by Wynérias Development and Holdings, ICC. This consortium of eleven companies (including several of the Big 26) desired an appropriately remote and secure site to pursue potentially dangerous research. The recently opened Wynérias system appealed to them for two primary reasons: first, the cold and bitter climate of Wynérias would make it unlikely that anything that should escape from them would survive, not to mention discouraging any pressure to open their world to settlement; and second, given the nature of the planet, the development rights were cheap.
When they arrived in the system, WDH first built their headquarters habitat in planetary orbit, and then moved on to construct Port Sung (named for Sung Iliastren, discoverer of the scientific method) on a mountain at the southern edge of the northern ice cap, warmed by a soletta array to keep the glaciers at bay. The city itself is a half-dome carved into the edge of the mountain, with a separate starport dome attached. While it serves as the home of WDH's planetary administration, and provides office space and other facilities - including limited provision for shopping and recreation - for the consortium corporations and others renting facilities on the planet, its main function is as a transportation nexus.
(The aforementioned recreation facilities even include a winter resort and spa at the equator. The former is most commonly used by the executives resident in the Board's orbital habitat; those working on the planet proper have seen more than enough snow for a dozen lifetimes.)
The real business of Wynérias, however, happens in the laboratories. These are scattered all across the planet, their location dependent upon the risk level involved in their research: low-risk labs in the equatorial belt or carved out of the near-equator glaciers, linked back to Port Sung by maglev and service pipeline, while riskier laboratories are cut into the high latitudes, connected only by semi-ballistic dart and watched over by the destructive capabilities of both the Port and the orbital headquarters.
These are the foundries, then, where abstract science is refined into the practical tools and ideas which power the Empire day to day.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://eldraeverse.com/2025/03/02/cold-reason