Life in an independent human civilisation.
Chapter 1(In)
Deep in the absolute middle of nowhere space, light years from the nearest star, a vast swarm of millions of giant space rocks used buried rocket engines to move into an intercept trajectory beside an unclaimed floating ball of space ice.
The space rocks in this vast swarm were not planet sized, not even close, but even the smallest ones were 30 kilometres in diameter, and the largest were around 100 kilometres in diameter.
From a distance they looked like any other space rocks, but on closer inspection they were artificial structures, bristling all over with heat sink radiator spines, brutal batteries of antiquated laser cannons, heavily armoured doors, protruding rocket engine nozzles, and various other entirely artificial features.
Huge armoured doors opened on the surface of every rock in the swarm, and swarms of far smaller highly antiquated space craft flew out towards the ice ball they had intercepted.
The crafts landed all over the ice ball, and figures in old fashioned space suit designs swarmed out, shooting tethering harpoons very deeply into the icy material to keep their footing in the extremely low gravity.
Many of the figures stuck black flags in the ice, all bearing a huge bright red capital "A" in a circle in the middle of the flag, above the much smaller bright red words "Bash'the'fash'istan".
After this brief flagging ceremony, the figures hastily got to work strip mining the ice ball, ever fearful of an unexpected attack from the warp capable war ships of the hated fascists of the so called "Imperium of Man".
The figures worked with the fearful haste of people who expected to be blown apart if they tarried too long outside of the protective bulk of the rocks in the swarm, and this fear was well founded, for the hated "Fash" were very fond of blowing up floating celestial detritus balls during mining operations in hit and run attacks just to be dicks, the Imperium really were the most malicious nasty scumbags to anyone who refused to join their fascist dystopia!
Highly antiquated outer space mining machinery unloaded from the space craft made very fast work of ripping apart the surface of the ice ball into chunks small enough to fit onboard. These sorts of small celestial bodies were little more than a loosely bound gravel of various ices and space dust, held together more by meagre gravity than by anything else, and chomping chunks off with mechanical shovel jaws was not at all difficult.
The bigger difficulty was preventing the entire ball floating apart into a cloud of gravel when disturbed too much, and other space craft hung a huge thin flexible plastic sheet around the entire ball in case this happened, which it soon did. The entire object fell apart from the vibrations within the first two hours of digging, leaving an airless sandstorm of icy gravel fragments floating around inside the enveloping plastic sheet, to the irritation of the people trying to mine it.
It took a lot of tedious effort with specifically designed gravel nets, many many trips back and forth with space craft loaded with gravel, and more than a little gravel lost through the same gaps in the sheet that let the craft in and out, but in less than a day, the entire cloud of floating icy gravel inside the plastic sheet had been harvested as much as it easily could be, and all of the various craft and people and gear retreated back inside the safety of the floating rocks.
The Imperium had mercifully not come, not this time at least, and the swarm of millions of floating rocks had successfully collected their precious harvest.
***...
Deep inside the protective bulk of one of the millions of floating rocks in the swarm, people and machinery were hard at work processing their rocks' share of the harvest of dust and icy volatiles, the only completely new raw materials they had until the next harvest.
This particular rock was known as "Bernie's Mittens", named after an historical anecdote, and was itself just one of millions of rocks inside the swarm of the vast nomadic nation of ice ball gatherers known as "Bash'the'fash'istan", an ancient collection of radical left anarchists who had formed an enduring nomadic civilisation.
Bernie's Mittens was utterly unremarkable for a rock in Bash'the'fash'istan. It was a spherical object 30 kilometres in diameter, that was hollow inside and filled with many pressurised rotating cylinders that provided spin gravity without very high technology. These rotating cylinders were located in a lower pressure (but still survivable) 10 kilometre wide cavity in the middle of the huge sphere, with 10 kilometre wide walls of artificially deposited hard airtight rocky material to provide substantial armour against the weapons of enemy ships.
The 10 kilometre thick walls were designed to shrug off even thermonuclear exterminatus bombs with only moderate damage, and had enough raw mass to absorb even head on collisions with all but the largest enemy ships without breaching through to the rotating cylinders inside.
The outside surface of Bernie's Mittens was furred with long aluminium heat radiating spines, that kept all of the antiquated fusion reactors and other heat producing areas nice and cool, as well as vast batteries of laser cannons, mostly used to vaporise low value dangerous space debris incoming to collide at dangerous speeds, but occasionally used as defensive weapons against enemy ships.
The nomadic nation of Bash'the'fash'istan was ancient, predating even the golden ages of the dark age of technology, and had mostly extremely inferior technology to the Imperium of Man, mostly technologically stagnant since the nomadic "nation" was first founded.
Bash'the'fash'istan was perpetually located in the deep interstellar space approximately halfway between Sol and the binary star system Eta Boötis (Eta Boo for short).
(Author's note, I can't figure out how to get my iPhone to type the Greek letter Eta, basically a lowercase "n" with a long tail. Eta Boo is a real binary star system approximately 37 light years away from earth, with no other stars between us and Eta Boo. I chose Eta Boo partially because it's "flight path" a ship would traverse is one of the emptiest patches of deep space (with therefore little to no strategic value to the Imperium), and also because it is located "up" above Terra rather than galactically north south east or west (space is 3 dimensional rather than a flat map surface), which is kinda cool. Also almost no one has heard of it and even it's Wikipedia article is little more than a stub, despite it being one of the closer stars, so it's nice to give the system some recognition. Ok nerd ramble over).
Bash'the'fash'istan had been founded way way way back, back in the old years of O'Neill Cylinders and generation ships, mere centuries after humans first invented space travel.
In those olden days, when humans had first set out to colonise every star system within 50 light years of earth, there had been no warp travel, no astropaths, no artificial gravity except for centrifugal spin gravity. The only way to make the trip to other star systems had been the slow way, at less than the speed of light, with huge fleets of generation ships where astronauts would set out, and only their great great grandchildren would reach the destination, everyone else dead of old age centuries before arriving.
The colonising fleet that had been sent to the binary star system Eta Boo, a mere 37 light years from earth, had been travelling at only ten percent of light speed with the current engine technology of the time, and had a transit time of 370 gruelling years.
The Eta Boo generation ship fleet population had been fine for the first hundred years or so, but once every generation still alive had been born on the ships, yet had come to realise that they would never live to see the end of the journey, all hell had broken loose.
Many of the inhabitants of the generation ships had deeply resented being what they saw as nothing but human stepping stones, who would in no way benefit from this trip, and whose grandchildren would even die of old age before seeing journey's end.
There had been spectacular rage and violence, riots and anarchy, terrible civil unrest as the society of the generation fleet tore itself apart in despair.
Fascistic authoritarians had risen to power in the fleet, putting down the unrest with terrible violence. This had worked to bring much of the population under control, but those who had remained rebellious had become ever more radicalised and far left wing in response, resurrecting the ancient philosophies of Marx and movements like neo-Antifa.
A small but extremely violent minority of the fleet population had converted to follow an extreme radical far left political philosophy they coined "Fash'Bash", that encouraged perpetual physical violence against everyone else in society until they "stopped being fucking fascists".
This Fash'Bash movement had been so successful in completely antagonising every other member of the fleet population, that even the more moderate members of the population had joined forces with the fascistic elements to fight the Fash'Bash adherents, and the Fash'Bash faction had been driven back out of one ship after another, until they were all concentrated on a single ship with no one else on board.
The Fash'Bash faction had seen no hope for the rest of the fleet, and their ship had broken away from the fleet, going its separate way.
This lone cylindrical ship full of people had then had a lot of time on their hands to consider what they should do next.
It had been long decided that continuing on to Eta Boo was futile, as they would never live to see it. There were also no other star systems anywhere near them, nothing they could reach in their lifetimes.
They had decided that if "here" was all they could reach, then right here was where they would go.
Interstellar space was rather empty on average, but it did have floating balls of cosmic detritus scattered around the vast otherwise fairly empty expanse.
The Milky Way Galaxy was old, and was very productive in creating new stars and planets, with some especially dense regions of gas and dust, (still orders of magnitude less dense than laboratory vacuums on earth), where the gas and dust could slowly attract together by its own gravity over millions of years to gradually clump together. During the bursts of energy and orbital chaos when newborn stars began to ignite and glow for the first time, a lot of these clumps of material were sent flying off into interstellar deep space to float around forever.
The Milky Way Galaxy had accumulated over ten billion years worth of ejected clumps of cosmic detritus just floating aimlessly around the vast voids between stars, it was widely spread, but if you were patient enough to gather it there was almost endless material resources out in these interstellar voids.
The onboard computer on the ship of the Fash'Bash faction had calculated the ideal trajectory and velocity to start harvesting space debris as soon as possible, and had then decelerated hard for over a year to slow down from ten percent of light speed, burning off the precious fuel that had been intended to decelerate at Eta Boo in over a century from now.
The ship had lost the speed needed to ever leave this starless void in less than many thousands of years, the rest of the fleet shooting way ahead of them now, and the ship had slowed to a similar speed to all the floating cosmic junk, making mining the celestial balls finally possible (without smashing into them at a fraction of light speed).
The Fash'Bash faction had then mined the first floating object they had encountered, and had never stopped mining floating interstellar crap ever since.
The members of this faction had declared themselves a newly founded anarchist nation, naming themselves the nation of Bash'the'fash'istan, a nation of complete and total anarchists who stayed physically unified solely out of pragmatic survival advantage.
Bash'the'fash'istan had had a viably sized breeding population of humans, and had quickly gotten busy multiplying themselves with quite astonishing amounts of anarchic casual sex.
They had been happy enough, mining space rocks for their own benefit and comfort had a lot more... Dignity, than wasting their lives acting as carefully controlled human generational stepping stones in a generation fleet.
Life had been no more hard than at any time in their lives before, and had in fact been a lot more comfortable with the extra resources allowing them to build things up bigger for a change.
The people of Bash'the'fash'istan had contentedly accepted their new fate as intrepid space miners, miners who got to keep 100 percent of their mine harvests just for themselves and their own use alone. With each new object they mined, they permanently gained more materials to use anyway they liked.
They had added on to their ship, making it bigger and bigger, storing excess material on the outside like ablative armour just for somewhere to put it all.
They had bred and multiplied, growing their own vegan organic food and vitamin B12 supplements inside their rotating cylinders, ever constructing more cylinders to grow more surplus food and house more people.
Generations had passed, every generation building on the work of the past, until the original ship was now a spherical object a hundred kilometres in diameter, with fully ten kilometres of surplus material stored on the outside.
The population had still grown, as had the surplus material from mining, and Bash'the'fash'istan had been forced to start building more ships just to hold everyone and contain all the material.
After nearly 40 thousand years of this practice, Bash'the'fash'istan now had literally millions of massive ships with kilometres of surplus material enveloping them, and an ever increasing population already rivalling most Imperium Hive Worlds.
In all this time they had had little technology advancement, but they had held onto all of their original knowledge, knowing much ancient historical knowledge that was forgotten even by the Imperium.
Unlike the deluded fascists of the Mechanicus, they actually understood that technology wasn't magic, and knew how it worked. They understood science and had excellent universal education in their anarchist collectives.
They had gradually moved away from the belligerent philosophy of Fash'Bash over the long years, adopting a more peaceful anarchist philosophy that did not go out of its way to cause violence as an aggressor, becoming purely defensive fighters.
They wanted little contact with the outside universe, suspecting the rest of humanity to be tainted by right wing political views. The inhabitants of Bash'the'fash'istan were not belligerent or automatically hostile to those few other humans they had encountered over the long millennia, so long as they were peaceful and not openly politically right wing, but they did not seek others out, and did not desire to leave the interstellar void they called home.
Bash'the'fash'istan just wanted to be left alone to harvest space debris in peace, in a part of space that no one else was using for anything, and, up until ever since the fascistic "great crusades" ten thousand years ago, absolutely no one had bothered the peaceful miners of Bash'the'fash'istan.
The Imperium of Man were the worst fashy cunts in the entire universe, they had killed billions of Bash'the'fash'istan people!
The cunts had repeatedly showed up out of nowhere in FTL capable warp ships, and arrogantly demanded that Bash'the'fash'istan become part of their chud society under some fascist dictator calling himself "The Emperor".
Bash'the'fash'istan had told these chuds to go get fucked. The cunts had then tried to invade Bash'the'fash'istan with giant racist super soldiers in power armour who just teleported into the cylinders out of thin air!
The fashy cunts had committed massive massive genocide, searching for "leaders" who would agree to surrender Bash'the'fash'istan to the fash. Searching for leaders in an anarchist society was a fool's errand, they had none, just trillions of individual people with a common goal. The only way to defeat Bash'the'fash'istan was to personally fight every single person in the entire vast nation.
The fascists had certainly tried to do this, but the millions of ships in Bash'the'fash'istan had fired their lasers at the enemy ships, overloading their strange force field technology and burning the ships to molten slag one by one until the attacking fleets used their FTL to flee.
The super soldiers had been horrific mass murdering cunts, but they had run out of ammunition eventually and then been gunned down by billions of extremely pissed off anarchists with assault rifles.
The chuds should have stopped at this, but they just kept coming, being total dicks. They launched new invasions or hit and run space battles sometimes multiple times in the same year, flooding the rocks with legions of human cannon fodder in space suits in a futile attempt to capture Bash'the'fash'istan.
They had succeeded in blowing up thousands of rocks, and killing billions of people, but Bash'the'fash'istan was simply too big, too numerous, and too leaderless for any of these tactics to work. They would not be humbled into licking the boot of fascism, and their defences were too strong to defeat without losing far more ships than the Imperium was prepared to lose for no real gain.
The floating rock of Bernie's Mittens was itself scarred from war, huge holes blasted into its thick armoured material layers. The Imperial Fists and Ultra-fascists had teleported inside fairly recently and committed genocide in one of the cylinders before teleporting out again, and the local inhabitants all kept their guns handy should the chud super soldiers suddenly return.
Things would be great if these Nazi fucks would just leave Bash'the'fash'istan alone!
Deep inside the central microgravity cavity of Bernie's Mittens, a crazy semi planned layout of pressurised rotating cylinders spun on an interconnected framework of axle mounts that held the spinning cylinders in place. The framework itself had a crazy interconnected tangle of gravity-less huge pressurised tubes, letting people and cargo move between cylinders and to the ten kilometre thick outer walls.
All sorts of power cables, pipes, data cables and heat exchange pipes festooned the entire tangle of framework and the cavity itself, all minimally planned but effective in keeping Bernie's Mittens comfortable and serviced.
The cylinders themselves were not all the same size or shape. Some were tapered at the ends to give varying levels of spin gravity, some were just flat ended cylinders, some were nested inside each other or multi-floored, some were single floored and not nested. Few were the same length or diameter, and most spun at slightly different speeds, about half spinning clockwise and half counterclockwise.
Inside the cylinders were an anarchic poorly planned mix of biomes and structures, with little except an original long central road going in a straight line from end to end of the cylinder being planned at all.
People pretty much just built whatever wherever, with whatever space remained between the buildings being used as roads.
Pedestrians on foot simply entered buildings on a whim, as there was no private real estate property in this anarchist society, everyone just entered and squatted wherever they liked, and everything was considered communal property. Whatever you could physically carry on your person was considered your personal property for as long as you physically carried it, but everything else was fair game for others to use.
There was both constant theft and no theft at all, depending upon how you viewed it, because others could also only claim ownership of what they physically carried, so you could just steal back whatever was stolen. No one could really hoard anything from other people, and most things were simply constantly changing hands between everyone as needed. Nothing you lost stayed lost forever, it would always eventually cycle its way back into your hands through random changing of hand.
The shittier parts of the cylinders were mostly given over to organic vegan communal farming in dirt patches under artificial lights, with vast amounts of soybeans and fruit trees being especially popular. The lower gravity nested cylinders or the upper floors of multiple level cylinders were especially popular locations for communal garden farms, as humans didn't do so well permanently living in low gravity anyway and generally didn't want to live in these spaces.
The poorly planned farming practices of these anarchist communal garden farms were far from the efficient food outputs of the industrial farming methods of an Imperial Agri World, but the anarchists didn't need to be exporting vast surpluses of food like the Agri Worlds did, so could manage with this more labour intensive subsistence agriculture. They only grew what they themselves needed on a local level, and had refrigerators and freezers to store food as long as they needed.
The inhabited sections of cylinders were themselves an overgrown warren of vegetation, as the only time vegetation was managed was if it was someone's hobby. Most of the floor of the cylinders was covered in moist dirt, whether by design or by simple lack of organised cleaning for thousands of years, and agricultural plants from the farms had colonised every dirt patch they could find. Fruit vines and melon vines engulfed almost every building, growing over the walls and roof, leaf litter was everywhere in huge piles that eventually became even more soil, and only regular pedestrian and vehicle traffic kept the roads and doors of buildings free from the choking vegetation.
The "sky" of the cylinders was always quite high, even in every level of the multi story or nested cylinders. It was vital for ventilation to have massive open air pockets above every "floor" of the cylinders to keep the air circulating, especially with such poor planning making a mockery of any system of air ducts that might solve this problem.
It was always lit to daytime lighting levels in the cylinders, simply because the anarchists couldn't agree on the timing of a day and night cycle. Even if one person said it was night time and turned one overhead light off, another would say it was day time and turn another overhead light on. Everyone had given up thousands of years ago and simply left the lights on all the time, relying on radiating the heat outside the rock to keep the temperature comfortable.
The air was inevitably humid from so much lighting evaporating the water in innumerable decorative water features random individuals had made all over the place as a hobby, as well as evaporation from leaves and from people breathing, and tangled overhead finned cooling pipes on a forest of poorly planned metal support poles that kept the humid air cool caused constant condensation to drip down everywhere, eternally watering all of the dirt the plants grew from.
In this damp humid overgrown warren of vegetation, the areas where a lot of buildings congregated were dimly lit under the canopies of vegetation, frequently having forests of vast fruit trees growing out of thick piles of composted leaf litter that had accumulated on the uncleaned roofs. The poorly planned roads and walkways between buildings were almost always roofed over with branches and vines, and kept clear of vegetation and leaf litter solely by the abrasion of passing traffic.
The ground itself was a thick layered sediment of thousands of years of leaf litter and dust and local landfill, with some old buildings buried in the stuff and reachable only by sloping ramps cut into the sediment. Other newer buildings were built on top of the built up sediment, and new infrastructure was routinely added by locals with a hobby for installing infrastructure.
Sewerage and waste management was itself a rather inexact science in this chaotic place, and simple pit toilets dug into the sediment were extremely common, and broken things just thrown in small landfill piles all over the place. Soap and clean water was readily available, and this went a great way to maintaining hygiene in this chaotic place.
Artificial computer intelligences dotted the cylinders, and handled important things like the local atmospheric composition in every tiny communal area, wired into machines that helped keep the air breathable. These artificial intelligences were in constant communication with others of their kind throughout Bernie's Mittens, and together these maintained the atmosphere and a few other vital things that could not be left to chaotic chance.
(Author's note, I feel like I am picking on anarchists a lot here, which is not my intent. I am not trying to pick on any existing political group in the 21st century (unless they are like neo-Nazis or ISIS or some nasty shit like that), this is supposed to be set way way WAY in the future where political philosophies have evolved somewhat into sillier versions of themselves. Fash'Bash philosophy for example, where they just constantly bash everyone in society, is well outside of the typical behaviour of ideas like antifa that sometimes favour violence but only towards their enemies. Fash'Bash would be considered a ridiculously over the top straw man of something like antifa, but in the general prevailing silliness of the 40k universe, you can go to these crazy places. Mostly my point is, please don't abuse me in inbox messages.)
The cylinders that had industrial production capacity were currently waiting, as microgravity processing plants buried in the protective wall of armour got to work processing Bernie's Mittens' share of the mining harvest.
This harvest would be divided into a lot of icy hydrogen rich volatiles like water, methane and ammonia, which they mostly didn't want, and a far smaller amount of mineral rich space dust that they greatly wanted. Much of the unwanted volatiles would be used as reaction mass to blast out the rocket engines after highly valuable trace elements like deuterium were extracted, a tiny amount might be used in Bernie's Mittens for atmosphere or the like, and the rest would be very happily donated to anyone else in Bash'the'fash'istan who wanted the stuff, often used to provide water and atmosphere to newly constructed ships.
The useful bits of the harvest would then be sent to communal industrial processing buildings inside the cylinders, to be manufactured into building materials and useful products by random people with a passionate hobby for this sort of thing.
The harvest this time was small, for the ice ball had been only a kilometre in diameter, barely worth mining, but when you had to travel billions of kilometres between each individual ball of ice, you couldn't afford to pass up any harvest.
Out in the wider swarm of Bash'the'fash'istan, networked navigation computers in every ship were already firing their fusion powered rocket engines in perfect synchrony, with an artificial cooperation impossible for their merely human inhabitants, and the nomadic nation was on the move once more.
There was only one logical object to head for, the closest floating ice ball with a momentum and trajectory that could be economically intercepted. In the vast emptiness of this void, there was usually only one obvious target to head to next after a given harvest, one object that cost far less fuel and time to reach compared to all the other choices available. It was this logical pragmatism in flight paths that had kept the nomadic nation of ships together so long, the millions of ships were simply always heading for the same target each time, so had little choice but to remain together.
The target was much larger than usual, 500 kilometres in diameter, and was approximately 2 billion kilometres away. With their engines it would take under a year to intercept this object.
The inhabitants of the nomadic nation relaxed, and processed the recent harvest at their leisure, it was a long trip.
***...
In the humid interior of one of the cylinders inside Bernie's Mittens, a young brunette woman named Carmen yawned sleepily, on a pile of soft leaf litter under an overhead canopy of grape vines stretched over a tangle of hanging data cables, blinking herself awake.
Around Carmen lay a gaggle of other sleeping people in various states of undress, a collection of gender identities who had all engaged in casual group sex and fallen asleep. Carmen herself was snuggled between two shirtless men who were perfect strangers, both of whom she had been intimate with before they fell asleep. Alcohol bottles and drug canisters lay empty all around them in the leaf litter, evidence of what had fuelled this casual romp between strangers.
Carmen sat up, wondering where her bra had gotten to, and stretched her arms above her head, showing off poorly shaved smelly armpits in need of a wash. She looked rather unkempt after a day and night of getting shit faced on drugs and having group sex with a bunch of equally shit faced strangers, and was in need of a shower.
Her mind reordered itself slowly after her drug blasted romp, and she sat topless in the leaf litter for a while, waking up and regaining her wits.
It was pleasantly cool and humid, and the light was mottled under the canopy of vines. The overhead lights blazed with the power of earth daylight like they always did, but the canopy cover provided a wonderful blanket of shade for bleary eyes. Stingless bees buzzed softly around flowers, their noise soothing and relaxing.
Carmen's little group of strangers were in an overgrown wide dead end alley that led nowhere, between a cluster of automated data centres of one of the innumerable artificial intelligences that infested Bash'the'fash'istan.
Nobody used this alley to travel anywhere, because it didn't lead anywhere, so it had a nice amount of soft leaf litter for shit faced drunks to fuck on in an ill advised casual orgy.
Bernie's Mittens had no pest insects or infectious diseases of any kind, courtesy of the original generation ship of their ancestors being a perfectly controlled environment with a perfectly healthy original starting crew when leaving earth. It was safe to have unprotected sex in damp leaf litter without fear of disease or getting bitten by insects, the worst that could result from this was pregnancy.
Carmen herself had a hormonal contraceptive device implanted in her arm, so even potential pregnancy was no problem for her, letting her enjoy consequence free sex without even thinking about it.
Carmen found her bra in the leaf litter nearby, and put it on, she had only been wearing a bra and panties to start with yesterday so didn't have the bother of trying to find other clothes.
With her meagre attire located, she simply got up and left the group of sleeping strangers without even saying goodbye.
She walked barefoot through the soft leaf litter of the alley, and stepped blinking into the bright light of a clear sandy dirt road with far less canopy above to provide much shade.
Carmen followed the road, vaguely remembering where she was, and passed many children playing in the sand making sand castles with plastic buckets or kicking around balls.
She stopped at a pit toilet to pee, and drank at a public water fountain, and continued on her way down the sandy road.
She soon found a drained tile floored open air shower beside the road, with a lot of communal soap and other toiletries on tables next to poles from which shower heads emerged. Other people were showering naked in these showers, completely unbothered if the general public saw them, and Carmen got naked and joined them, finding a spare shower no one was using.
Carmen had a glorious wash in warm water, having a much needed shave in various places with a communal razor she found. She soaped and shampooed herself, picked leaves off an overhead tree branch and carefully tore them in a special way to make a completely disposable biodegradable toothbrush, brushing her teeth with supplied toothpaste. She used roll on deodorant and combed her wet hair.
Carmen then went to wash her bra and panties, only to find that some random woman was walking away with them...
Carmen tutted in annoyance, and looked around for a dry towel. She then noticed that this open air shower didn't have any towels, dry or otherwise, and sighed to herself.
Carmen was wet and naked and annoyed as she left the shower, her wet bare feet immediately getting covered in dry sand on the sandy road, which irritated her even more.
The road was crowded, but no one questioned the right of a fellow anarchist to be nude in public if they wanted to. Clothing taboos were for fascists, and the anarchists would not dream of imposing such taboos on other people. A lot of people looked, especially men, but no one actually harassed her or said anything about her undress. In the Imperium she probably would have been raped and/or arrested.
Carmen knew where she was now, and headed for a communal hobby workshop where people made clothing items for fun for the community to use.
The hobby workshop was a large solid warehouse covered in fruit vines, with a tangled forest of various fruit trees growing all over the very gently sloped high roof. Overhead cooling pipes dripping condensation all over the warehouse roof and ground around it, making the sandy road damp and firm underfoot.
Carmen entered a wide garage door with overgrown edges, into the dimmer drier interior of the warehouse, and found only a handful of people busily making their own personal hobby designs, none of them in Carmen's size.
Carmen rummaged around clothing racks of all of the completed clothing she could find, and found a beautiful bright blue sleeveless sundress in her size, and slipped it on without even asking.
She felt a bit breezy down below without any panties, but she couldn't find any. She also couldn't find any bras. Carmen grabbed some sheets of organically grown white cotton, and used a stencil in the warehouse to mark out a pair of simple panties in her size, cutting the fabric and cutting some carefully measured elastic.
She then went to a sewing machine and fabricated arguably the crudest pair of panties she had ever seen, putting them on herself immediately.
She then got another stencil and marked and cut the components for a very simple string bikini top in her size, and fabricated a plain white cotton bikini top, putting it on herself as a bra for today. Every adult in Bash'the'fash'istan learned how to sew their own clothes like this, it was absolutely essential in a society where almost nothing was centrally planned or organised. At some point in their lives, every person had had to sew their own clothes just to avoid nudity.
Now fully clothed, Carmen tidied up after herself in the warehouse, putting things away where others could find them, and she then headed out to enjoy the rest of her day.
She was hungry, and entered one of the innumerable large communal kitchen buildings, looking for something to eat.
She was annoyed to find that the disorganised locals had forgotten to restock the food storage in the kitchen, and irritably headed off towards a massive elevator tower to a nested cylinder above to get some ingredients from a community garden.
Carmen hummed to herself as an elevator in a glass tower took her and several other people up to the next cylinder, briefly giving her a wonderful view of the entire overgrown inhabited cylinder below her. The spin gravity got less and less as she rose in the elevator, the view got more and more magnificent before suddenly going through a few metres of metal and arriving at the first of several nested cylinders.
Carmen alighted in this cylinder with a few other people, (with a few others staying in the elevator to ascend to higher nested cylinders), and entered a green landscape where the entire ground was composed of thick rich compost.
Silos and storage bins full of soybeans and other crops dotted the green curving cylindrical landscape, with overgrown organic crop fields absolutely everywhere.
Carmen went straight to a grove of fruit trees and started picking ripe fruit, lifting up the front of her dress to put the fruit in, eating some of the fruit as she picked. When she had as much fruit in her dress as she could comfortably carry, she used the elevator to return to the kitchen, restocking the kitchen with this dress front full of fruit.
She then got started preparing a fruit salad for her breakfast, freely sharing it with some strangers who entered the kitchen.
With breakfast taken care of, Carmen washed the kitchen utensils by hand with detergent in a sink and left them to dry in wire racks. She then left the kitchen building, drinking from a water fountain on the way out.
Carmen had the entire day free to do whatever she liked. She could sleep any time she chose in the eternal daylight, she had everything she needed, and no one was coercing anyone to go to work or do anything. People did things simply if they wanted to, with specialist hobby enthusiasts forming the basis of a skilled voluntary workforce.
The education levels were extremely high, as everyone had so much free time to learn new things, and they had a great surplus of philosophy doctors and medical doctors who simply had a passion for their area of interest, and most of these were happy to find any excuse to use their talents to help the community, offering free services to all who simply asked them.
Women were generally fertile up to menopause at around 50 earth years of age, and Bash'the'fash'istan had excellent fertility medicine that could extend this fertility even longer, so women could wait decades to get pregnant if they wished. Plenty of time to pursue passions before being limited by motherhood. Abortion was of course freely available as well.
Carmen immediately headed to a public computer cafe building with thousands of public use computers and chairs. Every main cylinder had lots of these, and enthusiastic hobbyists constructed these computers from components that yet other hobbyists mass produced in communal automated factories. Computer stuff was a major hobby interest for a lot of people.
Carmen found an unused computer, and logged on. The computer facial recognition software identified her instantly from the cloud network, and her personal settings and social media profiles loaded on the screen. She was given endless different options for gaming, social networking, entertainment, and everything else an internet system offered.
Female friends immediately noticed that she was online, and Carmen was bombarded with messages about her recent drunken drug fuelled escapades, not judgemental but still wanting details.
Carmen and her friends spent a few hours talking online and gaming, before Carmen then logged off to get food from a communal kitchen.
Carmen was lucky enough to find a stranger using the kitchen who had just finished cooking a dish of various beans, who shared some with Carmen, saving her the time of preparing anything herself.
After her meal, Carmen decided to do something more productive than online gaming and social media, and walked through the cylinder, looking for something to do.
The cylinder was busy at the moment with the influx of harvested materials allowing extra manufacturing, and a lot of new especially high tech components were being fabricated using extremely trace amounts of rare elements.
Carmen remembered that the communal kitchens probably still needed to be stocked with food, and found a hand cart with big tires that could handle sand, heading up to the nested cylinder and filling the hand cart with food.
For maybe two hours she made trips with the hand cart, stocking several communal kitchens with what food the cart could transport, before deciding that she was bored with this, and sat in the nested cylinder at the base of an apple tree eating apples she picked from the branches.
The apples were good, lovely red delicious apples, and she felt content as she ate them, leaving the apple cores under the tree beside her.
Carmen was just about to get up when a rather handsome shirtless man in shorts approached her.
Carmen discreetly noticed the handsome man's body, and her body language became receptive towards him...
A few hours later, after first being chatted up for an hour and then being intimate with the man under the apple tree for a few hours, the rather disheveled Carmen limped bow legged back to the elevator in her blue dress and underwear she had made herself, and headed back down to the lower cylinder with normal spin gravity.
The daylight hadn't changed in all this time, as it never changed at all, and the cool temperature and high humidity hadn't changed either. Nothing ever changed around here, there were no nights, no seasons, no weather, it was always the same constant light and dripping condensation from overhead cooling pipes, the same perfect comfortable temperature.
The plants seemed to thrive in this constant light and moisture, and the harvests were much higher and more frequent in these conditions. It was a paradise for plants.
Carmen was quite well fed from apples, so didn't need to eat, and instead found a computer to talk and game with her friends for a few more hours, telling them about her sexual encounter under the apple tree among other things.
Carmen got tired eventually, and desired somewhere comfortable and dimly lit to sleep.
She used leaves and toothpaste to brush her teeth in a communal bathroom, and got ready to sleep, drinking water and peeing.
No one really lived anywhere in this communal society, squatting pretty much wherever to sleep. There was never any weather, no insects to be bothered by, and the temperature was always perfect everywhere, so traditional shelter was not necessarily needed, just somewhere soft and clean and out of the bright light.
Things like rape did happen very occasionally, but this was rare. There was no guaranteed privacy anywhere where people might not stumble randomly upon a rape, and there were a lot of artificial intelligence eyes and ears scattered around on various people's hobby devices. When a rape did occur, the artificial intelligences usually detected it and alerted the local area that someone was getting raped.
The perpetrator was then systematically gang bashed for hours by random men who showed up, and warned not to do it again, which was actually surprisingly effective. Humans reacted better to instant and swift retribution to moderate behaviour than to lengthy trials followed by long imprisonments. That just wasn't how humans worked. The brain worked best by associating certain actions with instantaneous extreme pain, forming a subconscious correlation between the action and pain, rather than relying on higher brain functions to reason the implications during a moment's madness.
Rape someone, get bashed for hours, soon you will be hardwired not to rape anyone, a simple system that saved a lot of time and effort for everyone involved, and completely in line with anarchist principles.
Just to be sure that rape wouldn't happen to her, Carmen always made a point of sleeping somewhere close to an artificial intelligence sensor, (such as right next to a data centre), or else somewhere where others were nearby to hear her scream for help. As long as you were not right in the middle of a crop field or forest you were usually in earshot of someone in this cylinder.
Carmen liked sleeping in clean freshly fallen leaf litter under dense canopies, in places that didn't drip water on you as you slept. Plenty of these places were around, certainly more plentiful (and cleaner) than the communal beds inside buildings that thousands of other people had slept on.
She found a sheltered dry patch of fresh leaf litter, between four fruit trees whose interlocking branches formed an impenetrable blanket against the light above, and was pleased to find that none of the fruit on the trees was ripe, so wouldn't drop fruit on her as she slept.
Carmen checked her surroundings to make sure this place was safe and public enough, and then found the perfect place in the fresh clean leaves to lay down to sleep on.
She took off her bra but kept it inside her blue dress so it wouldn't be stolen in the night, and slept peacefully on the soft clean fragrant leaf litter in her blue dress.
Life was so good and so tranquil.
***...