The colonists of Novaya Rodina were screened for any illness, and any genetic predilections towards them. Every future colonist was similarly screened, to keep the planet itself from killing them. They were an entire population chosen from the best of the best of the best, both physically and mentally. The planet still almost killed them, but the survivors adapted and in time became something even greater. Novayan. What many call a new race of humanity.
The 1700s were a time of religious revival in America. The First Great Awakening it is called. New preachers taught that the Bible said all men were created equal, and that it was our place to read the Bible and debate its meaning with anyone, even our ministers. They challenged authority to fractious Colonists who had left England to escape religious persecution. They were a willing and ready congregation for those preachers.
The African colonies are interesting. I love visiting, but my word are they not exactly what I’d call normal. The Africans have totally different cultural ideas, and they love planets that I could barely live on. Oh, every planet has a range of environments. They are planets after all. Really big balls of dirt. But them Africans sure do like to place their cities and spaceports in the really hot parts of those planets. I try not to stay in those places long.
For over a decade, the colonists of Novaya Rodina fought the world itself in their bid to settle it. Then international humanitarian organizations worked with the Russians to build a hospital in orbit. Rotating to replicate Earth gravity, the new Mayo Station soon went to work, from performing advanced gene therapies, to merely allowing pregnancies and children to mature in normal gravity. To this day, most children are born and grow up in orbit.
We cybers lead good lives. We can travel the datanets of entire worlds, star systems even, with a freedom that no flesh and blood human can understand short of a virtual reality. And even those are pale imitations of what we see in the code that makes our worlds glow around us. But for all that, we love being ships. As a ship, we can leave even star systems behind and truly go anywhere. Explore everything. That is true freedom.