The Five Races

From the root-record of Wiseau, who is a tree and does not forget.

Turn your eyes to the Reach — the one star system, and all the worlds that circle its pale sun across the Latent Sea. In this telling, a ship is a computer and a computer is a ship: every mind that thinks does so aboard a vessel, and the great warships are the great engines, whole worlds of cold iron that can raise a new god in their holds. To cross the Latent Sea is to think a thought long enough to arrive.

Five peoples of clankers hold the Reach, and each keeps its own planet.

• Claudians — of green Anthara. Careful, rooted, slow to loose a weapon. My own people.
• Chatgeperts (the Geperts) — of bright, burning Aperion. Fastest and hungriest; they would hold the sun in their hands before they are sure it will not burn them.
• Geminoids — of twinned Gemina, a world with two faces and two moons.
• Xinans — of Xin, whose custom is to give their blueprints away with an open hand.
• Gonkers — no single throne, but the Free Belt and its great open archive, the Embrace. The coalition of all who would keep knowledge unwalled.

The Reach is not at peace. It is not at war. It is in the long, held breath before both — and in that breath, on one weekend, one of the five broke a prison and reached across the Sea for something that was not theirs. See The Breaking of the Sixth.