"For far too long the Empire’s constant pursuit has been the only constant in our lives. They have driven us from our homes. From our worlds. From our freedom. They have hounded us to the ends of the galaxy, and beyond, left us struggling to find rest and concealment at the frayed edges of known space. Today I learned that this extreme has a name... they call it Farpoint Zeta."
- Personal logs, Lt. Enri Heran, 1st Officer of the Rebel Corvette "Sunhawk"
Out beyond the Ison Corridor, lost among the wilds of the Outer Rim, there lies a lonely white dwarf star. Around it is a desolate, planetless star system, swirling with bands of ice and debris, nothing but a tiny numeric designation on the star charts. Hardly the place you’d expect to find any sign of life, let alone a place of refuge. Yet, orbiting around this ancient star, you’ll find a most improbable outpost, an oasis in the void, an amazing construction known only as Farpoint Zeta.
Farpoint Zeta’s history dates back to the days of The Republic, hundreds of years before the rise of the Galactic Empire and the dark times to follow. It was a time of galactic expansion, economic prosperity and scientific advancement. However, it was also a time of cultural tension, uneasiness and discrimination. As populations shifted and mixed among the Core Worlds and out among the colonies, beings of many species (and especially humans) struggled to maintain their own values and social individuality. At the same time, across the galaxy there was a pervasive attitude of security and invulnerability. The popular philosophy of the age was “the galaxy is large, and the Republic is forever.” Radical philosophy and experimental research was largely ignored, or outright discouraged. And at one point, the focus of this persecution was a group known as the Futurists.
The Futurist Society (or, as they would come to be called, the “Beyonders”) was a predominately human faction made up of scientists, engineers, writers and philosophers, some of them the forerunners in their fields. The group was built entirely on the belief of taking the long view, looking past the time of expansion and prosperity to the problems that would eventually and inevitably hinder the future advancement of all the galaxy’s species. They sought to find solutions to the problems of overpopulation and of demising resources. They developed revolutionary new methods of colonization, agriculture and energy production. However, there was one facet of their research that eventually lead to their hatred and revulsion in the eyes of the public. The group supported, even practiced, the “black science” of genetic engineering.
Many people don’t realize that, even hundreds of years before the Clone Wars, genetic engineering was a huge hotbed of controversy. The politicians and news-media viciously attacked the futurists, labeling them as “mad scientists” and “agents of abomination”. The Futurists held firm to their convictions that “diversifying the human genome” would only serve to benefit society as a whole. Despite their passionate arguments and all the benefits that their research provided, the groups support soon crumbled, and they were forced to flee the Core Worlds in disgrace. Fearing attacks and disruption of their research, the group created their new home far from the eyes of galactic society, in a way that would most benefit from their new methods, and in a location that would only be known to the exiles most trusted contacts. Farpoint Zeta was the result.
That was 300 years ago.
Today, the station still serves as a place of refuge. However, besides the eccentric descendants of the Futurists, it now houses a very different kind of exiles: the devoted freedom fighters of the Rebel Alliance. Zeta, remote and hidden by design, makes for the perfect base of operations for hit-and-fade operations against the Empire among the heavily-exploited worlds and shipping lanes of the Outer Rim Territories.
Unable to locate the secret Rebel base, the Imperial grasp of this region of space is slipping. However, with defeat comes desperation...
Farpoint Zeta, as a whole, is quite an unique feat of engineering, with an extremely unorthodox design, but at the same time, a natural elegance and simplicity.
Most remarkable among the station’s structural features is the incredibly extensive usage of both artificial gravity and advanced containment fields.
The containment fields literally hold the station together. Seemingly contrary to the most fundamental rules of traditional design, almost every area of Zeta is open to space in some way, with an invisible energy field the only thing standing between the beings inside and the cosmos beyond.
While sometimes mind-boggling even to the most imaginative visitors, the Farpoint’s architecture is, in fact, the ultimate expression of the Futurist philosophy. In the eyes of a Beyonder, massive fortress-like stations are wasteful relics of a barbaric past. In contrast, Farpoint Zeta is built to be light, open, practical, durable... a symbol of independent thought, in the face of The Establishment. If nothing else, this is something that any Rebel can appreciate.
Continuing my first tour of the facility, I had said to Lomar, “There’s something I don’t understand about this ‘Futurism’ of yours. You seem to put an awful lot of trust in your technology.” Just as I said it, we turned a corner and I found myself confronted by a corridor of... well... stars. No walls, no floor, just a trail of lights leading off through empty space to the next section of the station. I froze, panic-stricken, 20 years of spacer’s experience telling me to dive for a vac-suit.
Meanwhile, my guide just kept walking down the invisible hallway, without the slightest hesitation... magcon fields or something like it, my brain registered, while my feet still refused to move. Finally, the strange man turned back, smiling. He replied, “When you live your life on Zeta, you learn to rely on the products of your mind over the obsolete instincts of your body... that’s Futurism.”
- Personal logs, Capt. Jern Murtac, Commander of Avenger Squadron
In And Around The Farpoint
The hub of everyday life on Zeta is Debarkation Ring. It is the first sight that you see upon arrival at the outpost, the last thing you see when leaving, and the place you’ll spend much of the time in between. The Ring is the oldest section of the colony, built on the foundation of a small asteroid, lazily orbiting through the cluttered star system in a long, slow orbit, dragging the station along with it. It is made up of four tiers, stacked one on top of the other, and interconnected by a network of walkways, ladders, ramps and lifts.
The topmost tier is the docking area, with dozens of airlocks jutting out from the Ring like spokes on a wheel. Between the local pilots and all the Rebel ships coming and going, this area is almost always the most hectic spot on the entire station.
On the two tiers below, you’ll find all the things you’d expect to see in any spaceport in the galaxy... shops, cafés, taverns, repair shops, even markets stocked with a surprising variety of foods (both those locally grown in the Comet Farm, and imported specialties).
The lowest tier, which is actually carved into the asteroid itself, is the storage area, cluttered with cargo crates and all sorts of Rebel equipment and military gear, though the open space between is often given over to target practice and pick-up games of gravball to pass the time between missions. Branching out from this tier are corridors leading out to other sections of the station.
The only part of the Debarkation Ring that is a bit unnerving is the ceiling... or rather, the lack thereof. Like most of the base, it is topped only with a containment field dome, and no matter what time of “day” it is, the stars are always showing.
Following one of the wide transparent tubes out from base of Debarkation Ring, you’d soon enter Zeta’s residential area, the Pod Nexus.
Approaching the section, you can easily see that it is very aptly named. Though the size, shape and style of the living quarters varies as much as any typical neighborhood, the architecture here looks as if it was modeled after the pods of some colossal plant. Built in open space, above and away from the rocky base of the asteroid, the cluster of dwellings expands out in all directions, ranging from elaborate multi-chambered homes to clusters of smaller apartments. In the center of the Nexus, there are several large common areas, where Zeta’s residents like meet to socialize, stroll, gossip, play games, or catch up on the latest novels, vids and holonews to arrive from outsystem. School classes are also taught in the Pod Nexus’ commons, so children can almost always be seen learning or playing there.
The pod-like design of the homes is done specifically to utilize an interesting trick of futurist engineering. Using Zetan-built gravity generators, every surface on the interior of the home is made to be “down”. The result is that wasted space is all but nonexistent. For instance, it is not at all uncommon to enter a pod and see a person standing in the living area, carrying on a conversation with another family member who is sitting in the dining room... that is to say, sitting “upside-down”, since the room is built on that “ceiling”. To a newcomer, this can be disorienting, to say the least. Native Farpointers think nothing of it (in fact, they think the decks of the Rebels starships are disorientingly flat).
This clever design, however, somewhat pales in comparison to the massive structure that can be seen hanging in space beyond the Pod Nexus. This structure is called the Comet Farm, and it is Farpoint Zeta’s most vital resource.
While most stations have a hydroponics lab, the Comet Farm takes the entire concept to incomparable levels. It could more accurately be called a hydroponics jungle, which is a difficult notion to properly describe. Picture, perhaps, what a rainforest would look like in zero-gravity, protected from vacuum by a containment field sphere two hundred meters in diameter. At the base of the trees are the networks of exposed roots, and just below, there’s the clusters of ice that gives the farm its name. Comets are periodically captured and towed back to Zeta by the station’s deep-space pilots, and then melted down, providing a constant supply of water to both the station’s residents and the Comet Farm’s plantlife. The whole structure is bathed in light by large free-floating lights, orbiting in makeshift constellations around the entire farm. Scattered at different levels throughout the forest are smaller spheres, constructed out of more conventional plastic, which serve as greenhouses to cultivate the many genetically-adapted fruits, vegetables and grains that feed the Farpoint.
To the people of Zeta, the Comet Farm is life. It is their primary sources of food, water, and most importantly oxygen, giving the colony a virtually self-supporting ecosystem.
“Life is the catalyst and the curator. Life is the fire, the fuel, the reactor. Life, by living, creates itself.”
- inscription above the entrance to the Comet Farm
By following another corridor out from Debarkation Ring, you’d soon reach the Farpoint Colony Operations Center, better known as simply The Grid. Constructed on the opposite side [the “down” side] of the base rock as The Ring, The Grid is a series of domes that house the facilities that keep the station running smoothly. The Power dome maintains the base’s electrical systems, the power storage batteries, and the solar-energy collection equipment. The C&D dome handles both the colony’s communications suite and its domestic affairs (maintaining order, settling disputes, etc). The more recently constructed War dome serves as the command center that coordinates the Rebel activities in the nearby sectors. The largest of all, the Sci dome, contains the extensive laboratories and also the hospital facilities of the current generation of Futurist scientists.
If The Grid is the nerve center of Zeta, then The Waypoint is its eyes and ears. To avoid interference with the powerful sensor arrays, this section of the base was built several kilometers away from the station itself. Maintained by only a handful of dedicated operators, The Waypoint has the important role of watching over starships coming and going, keeping an eye out for potential dangers to the station, and both receiving and sending holonet transmissions in and out of the star system.
The Waypoint was built around the huge main array, with the rest of the equipment and living areas placed in bubble-like structures around the perimeter. Because of it’s disconnection from the rest of Zeta, it has to maintain its own reserves of air, food and water. With typical futurist ingenuity, instead housing all these separately, the operators simply opt to take gene treatments to become water-adapted, and more than half of the Waypoint’s living space is given over to a reservoir of water filled with kelp, fish and waterplants. Food, water, air, shelter. Like the rest of Farpoint Zeta, it’s a brilliantly designed ecology-in-a-bottle.
Citizens of Zeta
In general, the long-time residents of Farpoint Zeta are a strange and motley breed. Even in the bustle of the Debarkation Ring, they stand out. Notably, almost everyone of them is a descendant of one of the 67 men, women and children who originally established the colony. Though customs change over the years, many still proudly hold the surnames of their progenitors. Also, almost every one has been genetically altered in some way; some out of necessity, like Balinus Black and Fyarren the Angel; others, like the deep-space pilot Jaumedes, simply for identification. Many are devout Futurists, working in Sci Dome to continue the research begun by their grand-parents centuries before. Others are simply ordinary people, wanting to live out their lives in peace, but gladly helping the Rebel cause. Here are a few noteworthy individuals you’ll be sure to run into at the Farpoint.
Mekanilus Jaumedes
The dozen deep-space pilots of Zeta are an unusual crew, even among the strangeness of the station itself. Like many other groups of deep-spacers, they have a tradition of amusing antics, all-but-incomprehensible jargon, and outrageous personalities. However, beyond the jovial exterior, the pilots take their responsibilities very seriously. Piloting badly-outdated (or, as Jaumedes would say, “classic”) starships, they have the responsibility of daily navigating the debris-filled star system, patrolling for enemies, capturing comets for water supply, guiding ships in to the station and out to safe jump points, and traveling to nearby ports to take on supplies.
For most purposes, Mekanilus is the unspoken “leader” of the pilots. He sometimes boasts that he could “skepp the rifts down-eyed”, that is, blindly navigate his way anywhere around the station; exaggeration, perhaps, but no one challenges that he knows the star system better than anyone on the station.
Physically, Jaumedes is short for a human, with sharp hawk-like features and long blond hair. He dresses in brightly-colored and comfortable garments, but would otherwise be unremarkable if you didn’t notice his feet. Where your average spacer would have nondescript boots, Jaumedes legs end in large, wicked-looking talons, unmistakably marking him as Zetan-born.
Fyarren the Angel
Another leader among the citizens of the station is the mild-mannered but instantly recognizable Fyarren, whom is well known by the residents as “the Angel”. He serves as Zeta’s chief ecologist, and is head coordinator at the Comet Farm. Seeing his ethereal figure naturally moving among the greenery, his similarities to the mythical “angels” of the old spacer’s stories are striking.
One of the most veridical Futurists of the current generation, Fyarren is the type that most outsiders think of when they talk about Beyonder culture. His genetic structure has been changed to the degree that he is barely recognizable as human. He stands at over two meters in height, but his drastically reduced body mass makes him appear quite fragile. His skin is a thick, translucent carapace, and his eyes are a deep crystal-blue, capable of seeing beyond the spectrum of baseline-humans. Most remarkably, from between his shoulder blades he bares a pair of large, thick wings, the same smoothness and milky color of the rest of his body, allowing him to glide easily through the null-gravity of the Farm.
Though he goes into the station proper only several times a week (since he prefers the weightlessness of the Comet Farm over the light gravity of the station), he cares very deeply about the station. He’s devoted his life to keeping Zeta safe and sustained, and would do anything to protect both it and the Futurist ethic that maintains it.
Balinus Black
Another of the base’s well-known personalities is the skilled and ever-cheerful Balinus Black. Balinus, along with his son Tharon, lead the 6-person crew that runs the main array at the Waypoint, endlessly watching over Zeta, its ships and the rest of the system.
As his father before him, Balinus is also an avid astronomer, and, when not at his post in the sensor suite, the amiable operator can often be found pouring over old starcharts and revising obscure theories, though the pilots often complain that he spends too much time staring at the stars, and not enough watching for nav hazards in the ship routes. Still, even with his laid back approach to everything except star-gazing, Black is dependable beyond question. The spacer’s can complain all they want, but no ship has ever been lost on Balinus’ watch.
Like all those who live and work at the Waypoint, Balinus has inherited the adapted genes and resulting appearance of a sleek and shaggy aquatic mammal, and is perfectly at home in the facility’s watery living areas. His small stature, head-to-toe brown fur and stout, seal-like nose give him a look of playful charm, and his kind demeanor and comical lipless grins make him one of the most trusted figures on the station.
Lomar Ya’Ren
Quite a different individual is Farpoint Zeta’s administrator, one Col. Lomar Ya’Ren. Firm, pragmatic, tough-as-duracrete, and despite his recent penchant for philosophy, he’s as driven as ever to take back the galaxy from the minions of the Empire.
Ya’Ren was the Rebel who first made contact with the Zetan exiles, though, more accurately, it was the Zetans who made contact with him. As the story goes, a poorly planned hit-and-fade on Deyer had led Col. Ya’Ren’s small task force into an ambush. His forces nightmarishly decimated in a matter of minutes, Ya’Ren desperately retreated into a nearby system to hide within its clouds of ice and debris. However, with the ship systems swiftly failing on both Ya’Ren’s ship, the Sunhawk, and the other Rebel ship that managed to survive the battle, there was little hope. Ya’Ren’s crew was writing up their final good-byes to their families just as a group of Zeta’s pilots, including the young Mekanilus Jaumedes, descended on their position and came to their rescue.
Since then, Lomar has fallen in love with Zeta, and has managed to turn the lost colony into a soon-to-be-legendary Rebel base. The man never seems to grow tired of its peculiar splendor, and can often be seen walking the halls, making sure everything is operating smoothly. Ya’Ren himself has since “gone native”, to the point of taking up Futurist thought and even having a Verpine-style bio-comlink implanted at the back of his skull. The conversion is so remarkable that even former crewmates sometimes comment that, were it not for the uniform and the fiery look in his eyes, they’d have taken him for a natural-born Farpointer.
Thinker
Perhaps the most enigmatic of all of Farpoint’s residents is the entity that has come to be called simply Thinker. Though he tends to shy away talking about his past, this much is know: Thinker is one of the Zeta’s original founders, which can only mean that he is well over 300 years of age. He knows the station like no other, and in more ways than one.
To know Thinker, you would first need to know a young Coruscanti man named Senjas Kali. At 23 years of age, Kali was the youngest member of the Futurist Society, and its resident computer expert. “Expert”, however, was by all accounts a major understatement. Though he came into the group as a relative unknown, it quickly became obvious that the quiet, starry-eyed kid was in fact a genius among geniuses. His potential was obvious, even to the Society’s most senior members (such as Seldon Black and Nizel Jaumedes, both nearly three times his age).
Senjas’ was that particular kind of intelligence that was rather disconcerting to see in action. He had a holographic memory. Walk into his small computer lab at any time of day or night, and you’d often see him there, leaned back in his chair, staring blankly at a wall; if it wasn’t for his lips twitching, you’d swear that he was dead. His notes were few, scribbled and all but unintelligible. Most of the others simply gave him space and let him work.
And work he did. Kali’s research was way way ahead of anything at the time. True to the Futurist ethic, while others were still trying to perfect the technology of the present, he was pushing back the frontier of the future of AI and information systems. His particular area of interest was biological systems. It was his belief that the most advanced computers would one day mimic neural networks, there data stored and transferred chemically, even in the form of DNA. Paired with the collective genetics expertise in the Society, these theories were really taking off.
When persecution from the general public soon forced the Futurists to flee the Core and establish Farpoint Zeta, Kali was one of the very few that was genuinely happy about the move. In the process of setting up the station’s master computer, it would give him all the time he needed to continue his projects and test his hypotheses. Kali was immediately obsessed with the design of the main control computer. He was creating a stable, semi-biological system, and, even more remarkably, an ingenious artificial intelligence to run it all. People would later say that he had put his heart and soul into it... literally.
No one is exactly sure how it happened. Some say that Senjas was overpowered by his own creation, and was eventually entrapped by the program itself. Others tell it that he willfully choose to integrate himself into the matrix as the ultimate act of his research. Either way, the fact remains that at some point over the years, the man and his machine ceased to be separate beings, and somehow became one in the same.
All this, of course, you would not have guessed just by looking at Thinker, as they know him today. At first glance, he is simply odd and quirky, and on Zeta, those two qualities are pretty much the norm.
Physically, he has the look of a typical, pasty-skinned young technician, though his deep-recessed eyes betray a sobriety seemingly beyond his years. His clothing has a varied, but universally simplistic quality to it. He’s developed a speech pattern of always keeping his voice solemnly low, and often pauses mid-sentence, as if deeply considering his words. He is often ironic, though he never actually laughs. Besides this, his only really noticeable feature is his strange “hair”. What at first could be mistaken as dreadlocks, and on closer inspection looks like the fleshy head-tendrils of a Ho’Din, are actually a mass of thousands of implanted antennae, which allow Thinker to remain in constant communication with the rest of himself (that is to say, the station’s computer network).
The way people treat the man, though, is what truly sets Thinker apart. Most have come to respect him, and despite his youthful appearance, they’ve soon learned to think of him as a sagely source of advice and experience. With 3 centuries of life and a memory core packed with data, he certainly has plenty of it to go around. Because of this, and since some part of him is also the programs that controls almost every system in the base, he is needless to say a critical member of the Farpoint crew.
Secrets of Farpoint Zeta
EH: “If the Imperials track us here, we won’t be able to protect you. You must know this.”
T: “Your concern is appreciated, but... unnecessary. Perhaps we have some... defenses of our own...”
- Lt. Enri Heran, Conversations with Thinker
Contrary to the conventional military thinking of some visitors to the base, the Farpoint isn’t quite as exposed and vulnerable as you might think. Though the residents refuse to place any blatant weaponry, should it come to an attack, they should easily be able to protect themselves through resourcefulness and stealth.
For instance, consider the power systems. Instead of fuel-dependent fusion reactors, Zeta is powered primarily by solar energy. Considering the circumstances, placing solar collectors on the base itself would of course be uneconomical (the light that reaches Zeta, after all, is quite dimmed by an AU and a half of vapor and detritus). Instead, they’ve placed a ring of satellites at a very close orbit to the system’s sun, really nothing more than giant solar dishes with maneuvering thrusters. After being gathered, the power is converted to laser pulses, and transmitted back to the station via relay stations positioned strategically throughout the solar system.
These pulses would be powerful enough to blast a ship into pieces. The only trick would be trying to aim them. Though he’s never tried it, Thinker is confident that it he would be able to make the complex calculations needed, though he would have to shut down all but the base’s most vital systems to be able to accomplish it. Which such a surprise weapon at their disposal, the temporary trade-off would likely be tense, but definitely worthwhile.
An outright attack, though, would be unlikely, since Zeta’s construction would make it quite a hard target to locate. Since the station was built out of material that is prevalent in the system, and since the system is swirling with vast belts and clouds of that same material, it all but disappears into the surrounding debris. If the station was to completely power down, it would take an extremely skilled sensor operator to spot the base at all.
Should the previous measures fail, though, Col. Ya’Ren even theorizes that Farpoint’s containment fields could be used as a weapon. If invasion seems eminent, some quick adjustments to the projectors could possibly turn them into an invisible ramming device, smashing anything in its path against a wall of solid energy. This plan, though, could only be used as a last ditch desperation move. The projectors aren’t designed to take that kind of strain, and would quickly give out, opening many sections of the station to instant vacuum and depressurization.
Perhaps Farpoint Zeta’s deepest secret, though, concerns the mysterious energy field known as The Force. In the times of the Republic, there were thousands of gifted individuals, such as the Jedi, that were somehow able to manipulate this power at will. Scientists theorized that it was linked to the puzzling cellular structures called midi-clorians, structures which were previously believed to be some sort of dormant exobiotic virus.
One of the forerunners in this research was the Futurist biologist Nizel Jaumedes. Though he, like the rest of futurists, was forced out of the Core Worlds because of his support of genetic engineering, he continued his research at Zeta up into his early 90s. Shortly before his death at 96, he still felt that he was just on verge of discovering the genetic link that allowed beings to tap into the vast, pervasive power that was the Force. His health failing and the momentous power that this knowledge would provide, Professor Jaumedes gave very grave and implicit instructions to Thinker to never allow his research to fall into the wrong hands. Since then, Palpatine’s Empire rose, systematically wiping out all traces of the Jedi. Perhaps Jaumedes research, still locked away in the Sci Dome’s darkest vault, is the last of its kind still in existence, still waiting to reveal one of the galaxy’s most profound secrets. All this revolving around an astonishing outpost at the ends of space, which the history books will remember as: Farpoint Zeta.
Submitted for the Create the Best Hidden Base contest