BY LETTER
Quark, Continent of
Continent on Corona with a significant baseline human population | |
 Image from Sei Solar | |
| The Continent of Quark on Corona | |
Continent on Corona, one of the largest surviving human baseline enclaves in the inner sphere outside the Terran Federation. The capital city of this continent is currently Heisenberg City.
The continent was originally settled by idealistic baseline merchants, venture capitalists, and utopians disillusioned with the Sol System power plays, sentient rights abuses, and even occasional internecine warfare during the later Federation period. Quark quickly became a fairly respectable and prosperous colony, and remained so for some time, until the influx of tweak and cyborg settlers who came with the big trade boom of the next few centuries.
Some of the baselines never really got over the resentment and sense of inferiority at being relegated to the place of "poor dumb cousins", and a fair minority of the population migrated outwards whenever they could afford it. The ones who stayed behind eventually adapted, and established themselves as artisans (bayish arts and craft seems to hold a certain appeal for some superiors, perhaps they are fascinated by the sheer rough crudity and troglodyte simplicity of it all), cheap labourers, novelty tour guides, waiters, greeters (popular in some of the bigger rl stores, they bow to every customer who comes through the door) and other service industries not requiring much intelligence, etc. But to this day the baseline enclave remains the poorest and most disadvantaged on Corona, and whilst Quark culture is not endangered (thanks to the ancient and strongly entrenched ghettoism), the population has been slowly but steadily declining over the past millennium, through a combination of outbreeding and outgening, migration and falling birthrate.
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Development Notes
Text by M. Alan Kazlev
Initially published on 22 December 2001.
Initially published on 22 December 2001.
