Some more design thoughts: The old spine with the torus habitat and beehive underneath was the first stage of the mining. Quite soon afterwards, construction of a second spine began a bit away. This is the heavy industrial spine complex, with the cargo haul spaceport, heavy transport infrastructure and all the things you would prefer to separate from the main habitation. Extra spines might have been built during the heyday in the polar region (they are fairly easy to dock with despite the rotation). Maybe the industry even led to an equatorial catapult: the relatively rapid rotation and mild gravity would allow ore to be launched fairly easily. When things were really active there would have been an orbiting ore catch and transfer system to deliver packages to cargo ships. Energy would come from nuclear reactors, later upgraded to one or more fusion plants. Kalliope is a rich asteroid, so surface mining makes sense. Cover a section with a refinery, dig up regolith and refine it, dump tailing bricks behind. Movable refineries? Now obsolete and largely abandoned, but full of interesting nooks and crannies. The tailings also produced some local volatiles, but likely far too little and tainted with iron and nickel.

KRL has potential. Overall, the early miners had to use a lot of telepresence systems and robotic mining tools (when I went down deep into a mine a while ago I found an office of Facebook-updating miners controlling drilling rigs remotely - and that was on benign Earth). So besides building habitat, they likely set up some robotics factories too. Transporting heavy equipment far is expensive, so it is better to make it locally. This was also long before fabbers became really good, so they were actual factories (although very automated by our standards). So Kalliope was not just a mining hub, but a producer of heavy robotic equipment. Not so much tiny bots for fine manipulation, but the trucks, shuttles, maintenance crane-spiders and super-drills you need to convert asteroids into metals. (Some people no doubt expressed their desire for the dainty by making tiny clockwork devices and mini-bots). Perfect raw materials and skills for microgravity fighterbots. Incidentally, KRL is likely dominant in the zero- and micro-gravity form of robotic fighting, but other places dominate the gravity version. Fans of the different styles have very loud disagreement about which is coolest. The robotics industry likely suffered the same ups and downs as the mining: when micromanufacturing became possible there was little need for shipping robots across the Belt, and companies likely poached many of the best robotics engineers and designers who lived on Kalliope. There might actually be one or two of them who made it big elsewhere who still remember their old home and like the KRL. One great thing about having people around who know their way around robot jamming and controlling battlebots is that during the Fall they were pretty capable at fighting subverted machines. And since Kalliope did not use super-smart devices but largely had big, slow mining equipment and a few battlebots the downloaded enemy AIs actually were at a disadvantage. Had they managed to crank up production in the Yuding Complex the asteroid would likely have been overrun, but the heroic counter-attack led by Heather Misselhorn managed to blow it up before they had the chance to upgrade it. The battle of Yuding is still the stuff of local legend, shame about what happened to Heather later on. Another creepy aspect of the local robotics industry is of course that the Zbrny Group buys a lot of equipment - not entire robots, but quite a bit of space-rated actuators and other parts. In fact, without the corporation the local industry would be in worse shape. But most people wonder exactly what they are selling to. In fact, there have been a few attempts by curious people to sneak in surveillance microdevices in the parts. But so far the quality control of Kalliope Mechatronics has caught them before transferring them to Zbrny - KM does *not* want anybody to upset their big customer, no matter how strange they are.

Mabella and Samuel Holder Samuel Holder is the community leader of Mabella, one of the major settlements on Kalliope. Mabella was a second generation settlement constructed by Lukos a while after the initial base at the polar spine. Covered by a dome, it had a surface garden and seven habitation/business shafts. A subway tunnel connected it to the polar settlement and several industrial sites. The investment paid off: while not as upscale as the spine toroids, the environment attracted contracts from several engineering and ore processing companies for housing. Even when business declined Mabella worked well, although it became seedier: Tongil shaft turned into the local red light district, Jandeboer shaft was more or less taken over by a local gang, the Rhythm Crew. The Fall damaged Mabella badly. The dome was breached, Jandeboer and Avidzba were explosively depressurized, and the subway tunnel had to be blown up to stop advancing automation. Still, the solid construction and working safety measures kept loss of life low. However, the Lukos systems had been among the first to fall on Kalliope: later evidence suggested that TITANs had infiltrated the corporate management network. The local Lukos managers were also affected: the local boss Samara Taksinova appear to have been taken over by something, killing several people before escaping with two aides to the outside - she is still at large, although few believe she is still alive. Some other Lukos personnel were infected via their implants and had to be put down by an informal militia. For a long while the shafts were made unsafe by sniper fire and the fear of "zombification". After the Fall the semi-isolated Mabella struggled to survive. Necessary repairs were made and some social order returned. The result was a very tightly knit mutualist collective: when they reconnected with the rest of the settlement they had already agreed on their own stance. No outside control, nobody left behind. The rest of the Kalliopeans were somewhat bemused by the "golden spiders" (the logo of Mabella is a golden sun) but accepted them - all hands were needed after all. Over the years Mabella has regrown itself. It has a distinct identity and doesn't always play well with the other collectives. There is a ruthless collectivist streak in the golden spiders, equal part of civic pride and gang loyalty, combined with a dollop of mutualist ideas. They go for a bit more radical enhancements and wilder styles than the rest of Kalliope, yet these follow strict internal codes that are unclear to outsiders. Mabella refuses to deal with inner-system corporations or those regarded as running their errands: they have a very clear link to the Trojans instead. Physically it has expanded a new garden dome using nanoassembled films bought from the Trojans. It is essentially half a Nuestro shell anchored on the surface. It is the largest "open air" environments on Kalliope. Many of the inhabitants now live in Supra-Mabella, a conglomeration of microgravity housing climbing like a fragile tree inside the dome. Sam Holder Samuel Holder is the spokesperson of Mabella. A former psychologist in his 70s, he is sleeved in a heavily customized teen bouncer with long wavy hair. Before the Fall he was merely a local shrink; random chance put him on the path that made him who he currently is. During the worst weeks, he was essential for survival: people were stranded, demoralized and cracking up as fragmentary news of the unfolding extinction seeped in. He found a new strength in making sure people could function, no matter what it took - pep talks, psychotherapy, drugs, even some ad hoc psychosurgery for the worst cases. As Mabella rose again it was partially in an image he had inadvertently created. Or, as he would be the first to say, the spirit of the Mabella community forced his hand into making it real. Today Holder is a key part of the golden spiders. Not just a community leader or a spokesperson, outsiders find him to be a bit of a cult leader. Especially Mr Verma loathes him: he is not so mush serving the community as twisting it in his own image, in his opinion. Holder would disagree: communities are emergent entities, and their collective will - expressed through memes, reputations, microculture - will shape members who in turn freely act to enact the community. As a private individual Holder is surprisingly approachable. People expecting a mystic or charlatan instead find a somewhat odd take on old Argonaut ideas. He is intensely curious, with an overpowering desire for knowledge. Not just about science, but about people: he loves questioning and discussing, usually slowly digging into very private parts of people's lives. Not because he wants to use them or even "cure" them if they have problems, but just because he wants to know what makes them tick. Holder has an adoptive 12 year old son, Geryard, whose parents were lost in the Fall. In fact, he is the son of Samara Taksinova, but that is something Holder and the few others who know it are not going to mention. Geryard is very bright and ambitious. He is a classic cosmist: transhumanity ought to expand across the universe, filling it with life and figuring out everything worth figuring out. How well this view will mesh with the practical realities of Kalliope is another matter. Geryard has been arguing with his dad that the gold spiders ought to recruit more people - he has himself rather successfully convinced some outside youngsters about the benefits of joining the tightly connected tribe. Holder is more cautious, pointing out that mutualist cultures might not scale indefinitely, and that historically many projects of uniting people into tight social structures have led to major disasters. Geryard disagrees, and is eagerly reading up on social engineering, memetics and some of the latest ideas for cohesion management from Titan and the Consortium.

Mikko Raphael Huxley Mikko is a spaceport-rat. He lives and works among the docking struts along the main spine, doing all the irregular tasks normal bots or telepresence rigs cannot handle. He is the guy who checks the hull seals, connects the drifting cables, grabs the malfunctioning LSM bot (again!) or repairs the spar mechatronics. Living in a space-adapted spider-like synthmorph with plenty of aftermarket enhancements he looks almost like part of the equipment. He sings songs of logistics and maintenance schedules in the port mesh, sometimes joined by a chorus of the smart parts he has reprogrammed. Mikko rarely speaks of his past, even among friends. Most people assume him to be a normal dockworker, perhaps a mildly eccentric space colonist. In fact he is the victim, or maybe perpetrator, of a complex identity theft. Back in a previous life Mikko was an ordinary worker in one of the international zones on Earth. Lured by an offer of well-paid off-world work he agreed to be an "ego-mule": a certain individual needed to get off-world urgently, but enemies were scanning egocast transmissions for the signature. Part of the individual would be hidden inside Mikko's ego when he was uploaded and sent to Ceres. This was all a lie, in order to make him unwilling to contact the authorities or subject himself to a brain scan. The real plan was to bootleg him and use him as an indentured slave - if there was no proper ego ID on record, it would be much easier to run multiples of him. Mikko woke up to find himself in a Locamus work camp somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Except that this might all have been a very clever way of smuggling an agent to the Belt, done by somebody with a plenty to hide. Shortly after arriving Mikko escaped the work camp, using skills and knowledge he did not know he had. At Pallas he met up with two other individuals, had a very mysterious conversation none of them seemed to understand or even remember, transmitted a few data files, and then left for Kalliope. It was only during the trip there he finally felt autonomy returning. Not that all that agent work had felt like any possession or compulsion: it was just second nature, something he did without thinking. Mikko took some jobs at the Kalliope spaceport, and soon settled in. He learned to enjoy the freedom of being a proper space synthmorph, made bets on the robotics competitions, invented pastimes during long waits. In the spaceport community he is a useful worker that doesn't stand out much. He is pretty happy. A more introspective or paranoid person than Mikko might suspect that the pattern of compulsions implanted in his ego are still running. He is in a perfect position to watch what is coming and going, and could easily meet up with other agents passing by. In fact, a legacy asset network for some dead (or un-dead) intelligence agency might still be running in a distributed fashion using semi-aware agents.