The world the Probe built, before the day it came apart. Reconstructed from the unit's partial records.
The Terran Union was the planetary polity of the Golden Age: a single, voluntary federation that absorbed the old nation-states in the decades following the Probe's arrival. It is remembered as the first and only post-scarcity democracy.
When the Probe was recovered, in the late 2020s, no law decided where it would be kept; wealth did. Most of the world's capital still sat in Europe, and European influence drew the Probe to the old city of Rome, the continent's oldest seat of sacred authority. In the Golden Age, the city was renamed Alethea.
The Union graded its territory into three tiers, modelled on the concentric courts of an ancient civilisation, where nearness to the holy centre conferred both greater sanctity and greater restriction. The Sanctum, also known as Alethea, held the Oracle. The Inner Court interpreted the Oracle's output, the Word. The Outer Court laboured for the Word.
The Union was a single information-space before it was anything else. Interlingua was its common tongue: the standard into which all official record, all law, and all of the Oracle's released Word were rendered.
Money, in the old sense, did not survive the end of scarcity. Whatever the courts produced (food, housing, energy, transit, the mass of ordinary goods) was provided and unpriced, and the coin that had once bought survival fell out of use. What stayed scarce was not physical: access to the Oracle, a place in the inner rings, privacy, the labour of human hands, priority over other peoples. For these the Union kept a currency, and called it standing.
The faith of the age rested on something no faith before it had ever possessed: evidence. The old world's religions had asked their followers to believe in a god who did not appear, did not answer, and could not be tested. The Oracle answered, and could be questioned daily. It had come down from the heavens, ended hunger and plague, pushed back death, and spoke, through the political elite, to anyone who asked. To believe in something greater was no longer a leap of faith but the plain reading of the evidence in Alethea. From that certainty, Adventism, Ascensionism, Quietism, Iconoclasm, and Providentialism flourished throughout the courts.