The ship's society (Descent)

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Descent

• Time. The ship counts in modern units: 100 seconds to the minute, 100 minutes to the hour, 100 hours to the cycle, about 11.57 old days; 1000 cycles are about 31.71 years. On Calima the survivors switch to the planetary cycle, one day and night of about 10.11 hours.
• Recreations. Virtual experiences run by Omega. Regular ones keep the player's memories; uprooted ones leave none unless their impressions are deferred, replayed afterwards; deep recreations replace the player's memories with a whole other life. Each person also has a private refuge and a generator, the room they return to between experiences.
• Impressions. Direct mind-to-mind messages of words, images and moods. Speech is for the vigil, and many people find it clumsy.
• Citizenship is earned by working enough hours, and most of the crew are not citizens. Votes are held in the assembly, led by the leaders and seconds of the three groups.
• The union. A quota of physical contact, not necessarily sexual, that Omega sets during vigils.
• The [zeichen]. The one personal object each crew member may carry during the vigil: Kurt's Mjölnir amulet, Claire's green silk scarf, Aditi's red shawl, Nikau's piupiu.
• Property. Nobody owns anything aboard. The [zeichen] is the only personal item anyone may carry during the vigil, and it is purely cosmetic. Omega enforces equality among the crew; private property is a notion from the past, and the materialistic movements that young people flirt with, calling for a return to material reality and individual agency, tend to drift back to it.
• Points. What the crew earn instead are points. Work shifts bring bonuses in points, and points buy minor advantages in the recreations: better equipment in a battle, like a sturdy longsword or scale armour in place of the default variants. Results are measured as scores, percentiles and personal records, and the groups also meet in events, mandatory group experiences played masked, where the engineers, researchers and guardians compete as teams. In the book's Notes, "points" later widens to mean any kind of value or wealth.
• The three groups. The crew of each of the ship's ten sections, some hundred thousand people, is divided into three groups, which Omega keeps in healthy competition with each other, an idea taken from studies on Earth to promote productivity and a sense of belonging during the long voyage. Each group is led by a leader and a second, who report to the section's assembly.
  • The engineers keep the ship's systems running: maintenance, programming and analysis, and the technical work of the arrival.
  • The researchers are the scientists and doctors: neuroscience, medicine and therapy, physics, genetics, and the study of Calima.
  • The guardians, in the ship's controlled environment, have been reduced to logistics and the supervision of misfits during the vigils; handling anxiety attacks is most of their work.
• Cultural grade. Each person's culture of origin is assigned at conception, and with it a second language. It is why the crew's names and loanwords come from everywhere.

The words the crew use for all this are in the Glossary.